Month: December 2014

Lost 1927 Disney short found in Norway

Modern(ish)

Okay I’m just going to say it: the National Library of Norway is the POMPEII OF FILM. And thus I too succumb to the irresistible urge to call Pompeii on a discovery that is nothing like Pompeii except insofar as something thought to have been destroyed, possibly in an apocalyptic firestorm, was actually found to have survived. Earlier this year the library made the news for its discovery of the only known copy of the 1927 Chinese silent epic Pan Si Dong (The Cave of the Silken Web). Now they’ve identified another silent treasure: Empty Socks, a 1927 Disney short starring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, that was thought lost except for a 25-second clip in the care of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The short was discovered in 2008 during a review of the National Library’s archive of nitrate films. The two reels were not clearly labelled so archivists didn’t know which film it was. The reels had once belonged to Norwegian collector Tor Eide who gave them to the Norwegian Film Institute. The NFI gave its collection of nitrate films to the National Library in 2007, and ever since then archivists have been going through the nitrate films to identify, restore, copy and digitize them.

This is a dangerous vocation. The nitrate film archives are kept in a custom-built climate-and-moisture controlled secure bunker near rock caves in the subarctic town of Mo i Rana. The high security bunker in a remote, cold location is a necessary precaution because the nitrocellulose compound used to make most motion pictures from the late 1880s through 1951 is insanely flammable. A little warmth or pressure and it explodes with more force than gunpowder. It doesn’t even need oxygen to burn because it produces its own oxygen during combustion. It also burns under water. The powder it biodegrades into spontaneously ignites even harder than the intact film. Handling nitrate films is therefore a highly regulated process with extensive security measures to protect the people and facilities from deadly consequences. The Mo i Rana bunker is partitioned into cells with fireproof walls to ensure that if there is a fire, it will be limited in scope. Every time a nitrate movie is taken out of the warehouse for study, it has to be left to temper for at least a day so the sudden increase in temperature won’t set it off.

Library film archivists Kvale Sørenssen and Tone Føreland didn’t recognize the story at first glance, but they wrote a detailed summary of the action. Føreland noted in the description that he thought it might be a Felix the Cat picture because one of the characters resembled Otto Messmer’s iconic feline. In March of this year, comic writer, illustrator, animation historian and former Disney archivist David Gerstein contacted the National Library after coming across some documents that suggested there could be lost Disney films in the library’s archives. He had already had success in Norway, discovering the 1928 Oswald the Lucy Rabbit short Tall Timber in the archives of the Norwegian Film Institute in 2007. The library sent him a list of film titles, but it was Føreland’s description of the untitled possible Felix the Cat short that caught his eye. Gerstein recognized the action as the plot of Empty Socks.

The first Christmas movie ever made by Disney, Empty Socks features Oswald the Lucky Rabbit playing Santa to some orphans, but his good intentions can’t save him from youthful rapscallionry. The little terrors set fire to a chair and the fire spreads through the home. When Oswald tries to douse the flames with a hose connected to the fire hydrant, the orphans connect the hose to a fuel tank instead and the orphanage blows up. The National Library’s film is missing between 30 seconds and a minute in the middle of the short (the sequence when Oswald hands out the presents ending up when the kids light the chair on fire) for a total running time of five minutes and 30 seconds.

On December 17th, the National Library in Oslo will do a viewing of the restored short and Tall Timber. Tall Timber wasn’t lost, but it is very rare, and it’s notable for being the last surviving Oswald picture directed by Walt Disney. Film archivist Kjetil Kvale Sørenssen and animated film historian Gunnar Strøm will introduce the shorts which will be shown with live piano accompaniment as is proper for the live silent movie viewing experience. The event is already fully booked.

No word on a wider release of the film. The National Library sent a digital copy of the restored film to the Walt Disney Company, The original nitrate will stay safe in National Library’s subarctic bunker.

Racton Man: warrior chief, early bronze adopter

Ancient

The year was 1989. Milli Vanilli had three number one singles and a metal detectorist discovered a bronze dagger blade and a few rivets on Racton Park Farm, near Westbourne, outside Chichester, West Sussex. A subsequent excavation of the find site unearthed the complete skeleton of an adult and three full bronze rivets that had once studded the dagger’s organic hilt, now long since decayed. He had been buried in a crouched position holding the handsome dagger in his right hand. Although there was no evidence of a burial mound, the value of the artifact and the careful positioning of the body suggested this was a high status individual.

The style of the dagger placed it in the transitional period between the Copper Age and the Early Bronze Age, about 2,200 – 2,100 B.C., making it one of the earliest bronze artifacts ever found in Britain and one of only seven studded rivet daggers known (three others were found in Britain, three in Ireland). Even though the discovery was clearly important, there was no money to research the remains in further detail, so the bones and artifacts were put in storage in Chichester. James Kenny, today the Chichester District Council’s archaeologist, was then part of the original excavation team. He published the find in an annual report that he and his team printed and stapled by hand. This was not a periodical of wide circulation, to put it mildly, so the word never got out and the find sank into obscurity.

Kenny never forgot about the dagger burial. Two years ago he and Stuart Needham, an expert in Bronze Age metallurgy, were examining a field in Sussex where a small hoard had been found when Kenny mentioned the riveted dagger he had excavated 23 years earlier. Kenny told his colleague it was still the most exciting find of his career and Needham was instantly intrigued. There are so few dagger burials on the record he thought he knew all of them, but Racton Man hadn’t made any of the journals so the discovery had fallen through the cracks in the scholarship.

Kenny and Needham looked up the finds in the Novium Museum‘s archaeological stores and decided to seek out new funding to do a proper study. Their aim was to secure enough money to radiocarbon date the bones, do a stable isotope analysis of a tooth to discover where he grew up and a full osteological examination seeking evidence of illness or injury. The dagger would be analyzed to determine the metal content. They were able to get a £1,980 grant from the South Down National Park Authority’s Sustainable Communities Fund, a shocking pittance that was all they needed to get started. The rest of the funds were provided by the Chichester District Council.

The first step was cleaning the bones. They had been put in storage directly after the excavation, so the osteological specialist wasn’t able to see much through the dirt. Properly cleaned, the bones were analyzed by experts from England, Wales and Scotland. They were able to confirm that Racton Man was, in fact, a man (the length of his bones suggested he was male, but it wasn’t certain until the study), and one who went down fighting.

Isotope analysis undertaken on one of the Racton Man’s teeth by experts from Durham University shows that he could have been brought up in southern Britain – possibly somewhere to the west of Sussex. Radiocarbon dating of the remains was undertaken by the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre in Glasgow. The result suggests that he died sometime in the period 2300BC – 2150BC.

Analysis of his bones by the London Institute of Archaeology suggests that he was 6ft tall and that he displays signs of spinal degeneration, which is thought to be age related. They also found that he suffered from a chronic sinus infection, as well as an abscess and tooth decay. Evidence has also been found of a peri-mortem cut – at or near the time of death – to the right upper arm bone, close to the elbow. There is no sign that this had healed. This is consistent with the arm being raised, elbow bent above the head, to protect it from a blow or strike from a weapon. These indications of actual fighting suggest that Racton Man’s dagger was not just for display. His social position may have depended on him demonstrating his prowess in combat.

Although less certain, there is also evidence of a similar blow having struck the lower part of the right shoulder, under the armpit. A sharp force blow to this area of the body would have been consistent with a double strike – one to the head, blocked by the raised right arm, and a second deep into the armpit, presumably to sever the major blood vessels in this area.

The dagger was not solely for ceremonial use. It had been repeatedly sharpened. The radiocarbon results of the burial make the dagger the earliest absolute dated bronze artifact ever discovered in Britain. This was the very dawn of alloy metallurgy so the dagger would have been an incredibly rare and expensive object, literally one of the first in the country.

You can see Racton Man and his dagger at the Novium Museum, on display in the same crouched position in which he was buried.

Vast archive of kimono stencils found in Dresden museum

Modern(ish), Museums

The Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Decorative Arts) in Dresden has rediscovered an unparalleled archive of Japanese kimono stencils in its storage depot. More than 15,000 katagami stencils, elaborately carved paper stencils used to print patterns on kimono fabric, had slumbered uninterrupted by curatorial interest in 92 neatly stacked and numbered cases for 125 years. This is the largest collection of katagami in the world. The museum is making up for lost time now and has put 140 of the stencils on display along with historic kimonos in the Elbe Wing of the Japanisches Palais.

From the wealth of motifs in the Kunstgewerbemuseum’s collection, those depicting aspects of rain, which has a particularly significant cultural and spiritual role in a country exposed to monsoon winds and dependent on rice cultivation, have been specially chosen. The uniformity of tiny falling raindrops also seems to be reflected in the aesthetic logic of the repetitive structural designs of the printed pattern repeats. The Designs became more and more refined as the fabrics for which they were created were increasingly being produced for use by the samurai nobility for prestige and ceremonial purposes.

When the first katagami prints arrived in Europe in the 19th century, the highly sophisticated art of Japanese pattern design had a powerful influence on ornament in western fine arts, craftworks, and on the emerging discipline of industrial design.

The Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York City has one of the biggest collections of katagami in the United States with almost 400 examples. You can browse a selection of them in the museum’s collection database. You can see how the esthetic inspired western textile prints beyond the deliberate references of say, Art Nouveau’s Japonisme trend (compare this flying bat katagami in the Cooper-Hewitt collection to the Verneuil bats and poppies wallpaper in this post, for example). This water pattern could easily be a mod print from the 60s.

It’s an ancient art, at least 1,000 years old. Katagami are made by layering three sheets of washi, paper handmade from the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree, and pasting them together with a persimmon juice lacquer. The final product is a flexible but strong paper browned by the tannins in the juice. Then the design is cut out of the paper using tools specific to the art. There are four cutting skills — Hiki-bori (long stripes cut towards the artist), Dogu-bori, (figurative carving using a number of cutting tools), Kiri-bori (circular holes) and Tsuki-bori (shaped punches) — that each artisan must master. The process is painstaking and requires intense focus of mind and hand.

Once cut, the stencil is backed with a delicate interlacing net, the oldest of which were made from human hair strands but they were eventually replaced by stronger and more stable silk fibers. It can then be used in the katazome technique of resist-dyeing which entails spreading rice paste over the stencil onto the fabric. That’s repeated over and over again, each placement of the stencil carefully aligned to get an even print pattern throughout the textile. When the fabric is dyed, the areas with rice paste will not change color. Traditionally one katagami is used for one kimono, although that doesn’t mean each pattern is one of a kind since it’s possible for artisans to cut several katagami at the same time by stacking the prepared sheets.

Also known as Ise-Katagami because for centuries the Ise Province (modern-day Mie Prefecture) was the center of production. Artisans would create stencils that were used all over the country. The art, expensive, time-consuming and deeply connected to traditional Japanese clothing, declined after World War II. There are few masters still working today, most of them in the town of Suzuka where you can find the Ise Katagami Stencil Museum in an Edo Period historical landmark home. Perhaps the success of this great Gucci bag with the company’s trademark double-G logo applied using katagami and lacquer on deer leather is a harbinger of new life for the art form.

Newly shiny Bedale Hoard at Yorkshire Museum

Medieval, Museums, Treasures

The Bedale Hoard, a trove of Viking silver and Anglo-Saxon gold discovered by metal detectorists in a field near Bedale, North Yorkshire, in May of 2012, is now on display at the Yorkshire Museum after months of conservation. It dates to late 9th or early 10th century and contains almost 40 pieces: 29 silver ingots, four silver collars including a unique large one made of four twisted ropes joined at the ends, silver neck rings, a silver Permian (from the Russian Perm region) ring, a flat silver arm ring made in Viking Ireland decorated with a Hiberno-Scandinavian design, half a bossed pennanular silver brooch, and an Anglo-Saxon iron sword pommel inlaid with gold foil plaques decorated in animal motifs of the Trewhiddle style plus four oval ring mounts and six gold rivets from the same sword.

The hoard was declared treasure trove at a coroner’s inquest, and British Museum experts valued it at £51,636. In January of this year the Yorkshire Museum launched a fundraiser so they could pay the valuation price and secure the hoard. Several of the pieces are unique anywhere in the Viking world, and little is known about Viking life in the Bedale area so the museum was keen to acquire it for display and study in the county where it was found. The Art Fund and the Victoria and Albert Purchase Grant Fund chipped in £11,000 each. Smaller grants from other organizations and donations from the public raised the rest. In June, the Yorkshire Museum became the proud custodian of the Bedale Hoard.

A few pieces — the four-strand twisted neck collar, the flat silver arm ring, some of the ingots — were put on display at the museum during the campaign to inspire donations. Since the successful completion of the campaign, the York Archaeological Trust has been cleaning and conserving the hoard, making it ready for permanent display. Conservation has revealed tiny cuts in the silver that were made before the hoard was buried to test the purity of the silver. Several of the newly cleaned ingots were found to have a cross engraved on them, linking them to Christian owners at some point in their early history.

Natalie McCaul, curator of archaeology at York Museums Trust, said: “It is only now that the hoard has been conserved that we can see its real beauty and the incredible craftsmanship involved in creating some of the artefacts. The Anglo Saxon sword pommel is probably the stand out piece. This is something that has been plundered by the Vikings and the conservation has meant we can now see the fantastic and delicate gold leaf patterns much more clearly and in some cases for the first time,” she said. […]

Conservation work has revealed the gold leaf work, which would have been done by highly skilled craftsmen, on the sword pommel for the first time.

A museum spokesman said: “The Anglo Saxon gold sword pommel, its guard and the gold rings from the handle were all removed from the weapon at some point before burial. Samples taken from the guard reveal both textile and wood fragments, suggesting the sword may have been wrapped in cloth and the hoard was buried in a wooden box.”

As of Saturday, the Bedale Hoard is on display in the Yorkshire Museum’s Medieval Gallery, and boy does it look great. It makes for spectacular before and after pictures.

Rijksmuseum acquires Adriaen de Vries bronze

Modern(ish), Museums

I love it when a museum wins an auction bidding war. The institution in question is the Rijksmuseum which has just bought Bacchic Figure Supporting the Globe, a bronze statue by Adriaen de Vries, for $27,885,000 including buyer’s premium at The Exceptional Sale in Christie’s New York saleroom. Three phone bidders engaged in a four-minute battle for the Mannerist masterpiece and the Rijksmuseum came out victorious thanks to generous funding from private and public donors.

The price sets a new record for de Vries, eclipsing the previous record that was set in 1989 when The Dancing Fawn sold for £6.8 million ($10,687,560). That was the last time a major work by the artist went up for auction, so if the Rijksmuseum hadn’t committed to this purchase, who knows when the next opportunity would present itself to acquire a work by one of the greatest Dutch sculptors for the Netherlands Collection. The museum owns a small bronze relief Bacchus Finding Ariadne on Naxos (c. 1611) by de Vries, and it has a larger sculpture, Triton Blowing a Conch Shell (c. 1615 – c. 1618), on loan from the National Museum in Stockholm. Bacchic Figure Supporting the Globe, which the museum is calling simply Atlas, is the first major piece by de Vries in a public Dutch collection.

It’s a particularly fine specimen as well.

Dated 1626 and probably the last autograph work by De Vries the bronze represents the mythological figure of Atlas, a nude man supporting the globe. It displays the virtuoso and highly individual modelling style for which the sculptor was celebrated during his lifetime. This exceptionally sketchy, free and tactile style reached its apogee in the final years of his life and shows him as a true artistic innovator, centuries ahead of his time.

De Vries was born in The Hague around 1555 where he trained as a goldsmith before moving to Florence and working in the studio of Mannerist sculptor Giambologna, the Medici court sculptor, in 1581. In 1589, de Vries went to Prague by request of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, the greatest patron of the arts on the continent. In this first period of work for the emperor, he made two large bronze statues, Mercury Abducting Psyche, now in the Louvre, and Psyche Borne by Cupids, now in the Nationalmuseum Stockholm.

He then traveled back to Italy to study antiquities in Rome and on his way back made two monumental multi-figure fountains in Augsburg, Germany. In 1601 he was back in Prague where he worked for Rudolf II until the emperor’s death in 1612. Although he was still technically employed at court, Rudolf’s successor, his brother Matthias, does not appear to have commissioned any work from de Vries. The artist found other royal patrons in Germany, Austria and Denmark and continued to produce work until his death in 1626.

De Vries’ innovative approach to bronze casting, modelling and the use of patina to convey differences in color as well as texture made him hugely famous in his time. He created Atlas using the direct lost wax method which models a central wax core with the features of the final sculpture before wrapping it in a fire-resistant casing and heating it so the wax melts. Bronze is then poured into the casing and once it cools, the casing is broken off to reveal the sculpture. Naturally the process results in areas that need additional work — extra blobs of bronze to file off, holes filled, details enhanced — but Atlas appears to have been barely touched. Even the details in the vines on the base and the figure’s head are as de Vries designed them on the wax.

His talents earned Adriaen de Vries the sobriquet the Dutch Michelangelo, but the upheaval of the Thirty Years’ War and subsequent conflicts saw his works widely plundered and the memory of him in his homeland faded. The largest single collection of de Vries’ sculptures is in the Museum De Vries at Drottningholm Palace outside of Stockholm. They were all pillaged, most of them from Rudolf II’s collection by Swedish troops in the second Sack of Prague, the last battle of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, others from the Frederiksborg Palace in Denmark in 1659 during the Dano-Swedish War.

Atlas is one of few works by de Vries to have stayed put for 300 years or so, unpublished and unknown. Since it was one of the last sculptures he ever made, experts believe it was sold by his heirs after his death. The first time it appears in the record is in an engraving from around 1700 of the gardens of the Saint Martin Castle in Graz, Austria. Its path from Prague to Austria is unknown, but the sellers have among their illustrious line an ancestor named Margarethe Leopoldine, Countess Colonna von Fels, who married into the family. Her great-grandfather was Leonhard, Freiherr Colonna von Fels, a prominent Bohemian noble who had actually been present and involved in the famous 1618 Defenestration of Prague when two pro-Catholic Regents and a secretary were tossed out of a window by Bohemian Protestant nobles who justifiably feared the concessions granted them by HRE Matthias would be revoked. Margarethe was born many years later and married in 1693. By then statue would have been a family heirloom of several generations that she brought with her to Austria, perhaps as part of her dowry. She installed it in the courtyard of the family castle where it remained perched on a column until 2010.

For a long time Adriaen de Vries was one of the secrets of art-history, a highly original genius, only know by a handful of insiders. The successful international exhibition devoted to the sculptor that the Rijksmuseum organised together with the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1998-2000, has led to a wider appreciation of his bronzes and a revaluation of his reputation; nowadays he is considered as one of the most important sculptors of the early Baroque.