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kottke.org posts about Art

The Missing van Gogh Masterpiece

van Gogh painting, Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890)

I didn’t know that the whereabouts of one of Vincent van Gogh’s most important works, a 1890 painting called “Portrait of Dr. Gachet”, is unknown and that the painting had not been seen publicly since the 1990s. This investigation into the potential location of the painting is an engrossing read as well as a good opportunity to appreciate van Gogh’s piece.

Many experts encountered along the way had no clue what had happened to the painting. Four art world insiders said they suspect the painting is held by a private, very rich European family. All parties had an opinion on the core question that drives such a quest: Do collecting families have any responsibility to share iconic works of art with the broader public?

The question has grown more relevant as it becomes clearer that most museums can no longer outbid billionaire collectors for the greatest works of art. Few paintings make that point plainer than Dr. Gachet’s portrait, a piece long on public display that has now vanished into someone’s private home or a climate-controlled warehouse.

For many in the art world, such a work is not just a creative expression, but part of a trade that survives because of the interest and deep pockets of collectors who may, or may not, choose to share their work.

“People are allowed to own things privately,” said Michael Findlay, who was involved as a specialist for Christie’s in the 1990 auction sale of the Gachet. “Does it belong to everybody? No, it does not.”

See also a new short documentary on the missing painting:

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Restoring Vintage Star Wars Posters

Watching these expert restorers mend & refresh a pair of vintage Star Wars posters (neither of which features the logo we’re familiar with today and one of which is signed by the designer) is both fascinating and relaxing. It’s like the posters are having a spa day: bit of a soak, a gentle scrub, some light bodywork, and voila, you’re brand new. (via meanwhile)

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Looney Tunes Backgrounds

a background from a Looney Tunes cartoon with the characters removed

a background from a Looney Tunes cartoon with the characters removed

a background from a Looney Tunes cartoon with the characters removed

a background from a Looney Tunes cartoon with the characters removed

a background from a Looney Tunes cartoon with the characters removed

a background from a Looney Tunes cartoon with the characters removed

This Instagram account posts the backgrounds of Looney Tunes cartoons with the Looney Tunes characters removed. As @presentcorrect.bsky.social remarks, these images are also a great resource for color palettes.

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Josh’s Albums of the Year

My friend Josh LaFayette spends the very last part of the year making fan art for his favorite albums of the year and despite all the pieces being visually different there’s a through line which make all of them immediately recognizable to me as his art. He’s putting out a few a week on his Instagram, but I grabbed these two because I also loved these albums.

John Moreland - Visitor

John Moreland - Vistor copy.jpeg

Laura Jane Grace’s - Hole in My Head

LauraJaneGrace-HoleInMyHead.jpg

My favorite part of this series is all of the pieces are physical, not just a file on the computer. Every piece is a reference to the design language present in the age of accessible digital printing—they’re inspired by what some might call “naïve” or “uniformed” designs that are common in the American visual vernacular. The Moreland piece is a take on the flyers for psychics you see all over and the LJG piece is your favorite hippie soap.

John Moreland Flyer.jpg

LJG.jpg

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Strata: Layered Watercolor Gradients

wavy yellow and orange layers that look like sedimentary rocks

wavy pink layers that look like sedimentary rocks

wavy rainbow layers that look like sedimentary rocks

You know me, I love a good gradient. These watercolors are from a series called Strata by Mikael Hallstrøm Eriksen, an artist who uses “repetitive and accumulative mark-making” in his work.

The works in the Strata-series are inspired by geological and natural phenomena — sediments, horisons, bodies of water, etc. These works explore a colourful imagery of accumulation, distance and transformation. Within geology and archeology, strata (singular: stratum) refers to layers (of rock, soil, culture etc.) possessing internally consistent characteristics making them distinguishable from each other.

You can check out more of Eriksen’s work on Instagram.

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Single Line Mazes

a maze drawn from a single line

a maze drawn from a single line

a maze drawn from a single line

a maze drawn from a single line

a maze drawn from a single line

a maze drawn from a single line

Wacław Szpakowski was a Polish architect and engineer who, over the course of his life and in secret, made a series of drawings of mazes from single continuous lines. From The Paris Review:

The drawings, he explains, “were experiments with the straight line conducted not in research laboratories but produced spontaneously at various places and random moments since all that was needed to make them was a piece of paper and a pencil.” Though the kernels of his ideas came from informal notebooks, the imposing virtuosity and opaqueness of Szpakowski’s final drawings are anything but spontaneous or random. His enigmatic process — how he could draw with such supreme evenhandedness, could make his designs so pristine and yet so intricate — is hinted at only in his few visible erasure marks.

Geoff Manaugh writes at BLDGBLOG:

But the appeal of Szpakowski’s work would appear to extend well beyond the architectural. At times they resemble textiles, weaving diagrams, computer circuitry, and even Arts & Crafts ornamentation, like 19th-century wallpapers designed for an era of retro-computational aesthetics.

Woodworking templates, patent drawings for fluidic calculators, elaborate game boards — the list of associations goes on and on.

Of course, I was reminded of Dom’s challenge to Ariadne to draw a difficult maze in Inception, the light cycles in Tron, and the Etch A Sketch…but to each their own.

You can explore more of Szpakowski’s work at his website, at culture.pl, and at the Miguel Abreu gallery website.

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Surreal Glitch Pulls

Artist and “pixel pusher” Niall Staines creates these slightly surreal scenes by pulling a 1-px slices to the edge of his images. I’ve used this technique myself but Staines deploys it to great effect here. I love these. You can find more of his work on his website and Instagram.

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Collection of 2000+ Free Science Images from the NIH

screenshot of the NIH scientific images site that shows thumbnails of the images in categories like viruses, anatomy, and proteins

From the NIH, a collection of 2,000+ public domain science and medical art visuals (molecules, plants, viruses, proteins, brushes for repeating items like DNA, fungi, equipment…). High-resolution, free to use — scientists on social media seem pretty pumped about this.

scientific image

scientific image

scientific image

See also PhyloPic, a collection of 10,000 “free silhouette images of animals, plants, and other life forms, available for reuse under Creative Commons licenses”. (via @waldo.net)

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Mermaids of North America

drawings of several different types of mermaids

Edith Zimmerman has put some new stuff in her Etsy shop, including original watercolors and this print of Mermaids of North America (which I love).

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Household Surrealism: Clothesline Animals

clothes hanging on a clothesline that looks like a fox

clothes hanging on a clothesline that looks like a T.rex skeleton

clothes hanging on a clothesline that looks like a sloth

Multidisciplinary artist Helga Stentzel cleverly hangs laundry items on clotheslines to make abstract animal shapes. You can find more of her household surrealism on Instagram. (via colossal)

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Chris Ware on Richard Scarry

the orignal cover sketch for Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go

Well! In the Yale Review, Chris Ware (one of my favorite cartoonists) writes about Richard Scarry (one of my favorite children’s book authors) and Cars and Trucks and Things That Go (one of my favorite books).

This year is the 50th anniversary of Scarry’s 1974 Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, which strikes me as a commemoration worthy of ballyhoo, especially now that, as a dad myself, I’ve spent so much time ferrying my own daughter to and from school and birthday parties in various cars that-well, mostly goed. (I’ve owned five automobiles in my life, all of them cheap, one of which smoked and required the driver’s side door to be kept shut with a bungee cord hooked to the opposite armrest, stretched across both driver and passenger. What can I say? I was a young cartoonist on a cartoonist’s budget.)

Unlike those budget vehicles, however, the new deluxe Penguin Random House anniversary edition of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go is lavishly well-made, attentively reprinted with sharp black lines and warm, rich, watercolors. It includes an especially lively afterword by Scarry’s son Huck, in which he explains, using language even a kid can understand, how his dad wrote and drew the book, as well as hinting at what it was like to grow up as the son of arguably the world’s most popular and successful children’s book author.

Reader, I have never clicked “buy” faster than I did when ordering the 50th anniversary version of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go — I’m very much looking forward to peeking behind the scenes. But also, do read Ware’s whole piece…it’s an inspiring review of Scarry’s career & impact and contains all manner of little observations like these:

(Lowly was perhaps the first children’s book animal character with a real nod to the ADA and the myth of “dis”-ability, and cheerfully makes his linear form work in all sorts of inspiring and disarmingly moving ways.)

And:

But the more one looks at his work, the more one sees how the European daily grocery trip, the walk to a nearby shop or tradesman’s guild, the tiny apple car fit for a worm are not part of the blowout-all-in-for-oneself-oil-fueled-free-for-all toward which America was barreling in the late 1960s.

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If Adam Picked the Apple

a painting of God rebuking Adam for tasting the apple and Adam in turn blaming Eve who in turn blames the snake

From Danielle Coffyn, a poem called If Adam Picked the Apple. Here’s the first bit of it:

If Adam Picked the Apple

There would be a parade,

a celebration,

a holiday to commemorate

the day he sought enlightenment.

We would not speak of

temptation by the devil, rather,

we would laud Adam’s curiosity,

his desire for adventure

and knowing.

You can read the rest of the poem here and preorder her poetry collection of the same name.

BTW, the hilarious painting is The Rebuke of Adam and Eve (1626) by Domenichino. That Adam, what a wanker.

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Free Rothko

lettering on a wall that says 'Free Rothko' pointing to an open window, through which you can see a scene that looks like a Mark Rothko painting

From French street artist OakOak, a reminder that art is everywhere and that art comes from everywhere. From their website and Instagram, here are a few more pieces that caught my eye:

street art of Vermeer's Milkmaid pouring water into an actual jug

a utility box painted to look like a robot

a painting in a window of Snoopy typing on a typewriter

And ha, I just noticed this one, a riff on Hokusai’s The Great Wave.

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Artfully Arranged Junkyard Objects

dense photographic collage of junkyard object

dense photographic collage of junkyard object

dense photographic collage of junkyard object

dense photographic collage of junkyard object

In a continuation and tweak of his Coletivos project (which I posted about previously), Cássio Vasconcellos took aerial photos of scrapyards and arranged the junked cars, planes, trains, and other objects into dense photographic collages.

OVER presents a scenario that seems to point to a dystopian future, but which, in fact, brings together fragments of the present. The exaggerated agglomeration denounces the misleading idea of “disposal”, given that objects do not cease to exist in the world when we throw them away. Rather, they inhabit other places.

This video shows the artist’s process, from hanging out the side of a helicopter to arranging all the items in Photoshop.

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The Distorted Paper Collages of Lola Dupré

collage of a Macintosh computer with hundreds of keys on the keyboard

collage of a very tall cruise ship

collage of a wide, boxy dog

collage of a motor home with dozens of windows

Collage artist Lola Dupré makes these wonderfully weird images of exaggerated objects, animals, and people. You find more of Dupré’s work on her website and on Instagram. (via colossal)

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Imprints of Nature

pattern of rain drops on a black background

pattern of ant tracks on a black background

pattern of ant tracks on a black background

pattern of snail tracks on a black background

Maximilian Prüfer makes art in collaboration with nature and animals like ants & snails. Using paper with a very sensitive coating on it, he’s able to record the slightest moments of activity, like a raindrop or an ant’s footstep. Here’s a video of some ants leaving their marks:

And some rain drops:

You can find more of Prüfer’s work on his website and on Instagram.

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10-Minute Art Challenge: Hiroshige’s ‘Sudden Rain’

a woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige of a river and bridge in the rain

The NY Times has been doing these challenges every Friday where you sit and look at one piece of art for 10 minutes. Last week featured a woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige called Great Bridge: Sudden Rain at Atake, a piece that Vincent van Gogh had in his personal collection and painted a version of himself.

I didn’t expect to last the entire 10 minutes — a slow start to the day (dentist, errands) had me feeling rushed and a computer with an infinite number of apps & websites just a tab or click away is not the ideal medium for this exercise — but once I got going (or, rather, once I slowed down), it was pretty easy. (via laura olin)

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Great Art Explained: Van Gogh’s Last Painting

It’s been awhile since I’d checked in on one of my favorite YouTube channels, Great Art Explained. In the past year, curator James Payne has done videos on Duchamp, Manet, Magritte, and that one painting by Caspar David Friedrich (you know the one). But this one, on Vincent van Gogh’s final painting, particularly caught my attention:

The mystery of what [his final painting] was and where it was painted would take over a century to solve, and that was only thanks to a worldwide epidemic. What it means is that we now have a deeper insight into what van Gogh’s final last hours were like — before his tragic death.

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“The Work of a Madman”

“Barbaric.” A “nightmare of vulgarity.” “Monstrous.” “A violent mess.” “The work of a madman.” Those are just some of the reactions that Henri Matisse’s Dance received after its public debut in 1910. In this video, Evan Puschak shares How Matisse Revolutionized Color In Art with this painting and other Fauvist work.

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Layered People

painting of a human figure with other human figures inside it

painting of lips with human figures inside it

I quite like these layered oil paintings by Moldovan artist Pon Arsher. You can find her latest work, as well as several behind-the-scenes videos, on Instagram.

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Irving Penn: Small Trades

black & white photo of two bakers

In 1950, master photographer Irving Penn set up a simple studio in Paris and started to photograph people of all kinds of professions, each wearing their work clothes and carrying the tools of their trade.

black & white photo of a man selling chestnuts from a cart

Working in the tradition of representing the petits métiers, Penn photographed fishmongers, firefighters, butchers, bakers, divers, baseball umpires, chefs, bike messengers, and sellers of goods of all kinds.

black & white photo of a deep sea diver posing

Penn continued photographing workers in New York and London, collecting the photos into a project called Small Trades.

black & white photo of two tradewomen carrying buckets

Penn said of the project:

Like everyone else who has recorded the look of tradesmen and workers, the author of this book was motivated by the fact that individuality and occupational pride seem on the wane. To a degree everyone has proved right, and since these photographs were made, London chimney sweeps have all but disappeared and in New York horseshoers — hard to find in 1950 — now scarcely exist.

A possible companion to Penn’s photographs: Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. (Fun fact: Terkel and his editor got the idea for Working from Richard Scarry’s children’s book, What Do People Do All Day?)

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Hokusai’s The Great Wave Now on Display at the Art Institute of Chicago

Hokusai's iconic work The Great Wave Off Kanagawa

The Art Institute of Chicago has three copies of Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic work The Great Wave Off Kanagawa in its collection and one of them has been removed from storage and is back on display in the museum until Jan 6, 2025.

The Great Wave has not been on view in the Art Institute galleries for five years because, like all prints, it is susceptible to light damage and must rest a minimum of five years between showings to preserve its colors and vibrance.

Here’s a video of the print being removed from storage as well as a brief comparison of their three prints:

For other places you can see The Great Wave on display, check out Great Wave Today.

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Big Hockey Players, Itty-Bitty Rink

For his 2012-13 piece The Obstruction of Action by the Existence of Form, artist R. Eric McMaster built a hockey rink less than 1/10th the size of a regulation rink and had two full hockey teams play what has to be the most frustrating game of hockey ever. This is definitely a metaphor for something but I don’t quite know what.

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Detailed Miniature “Sculptures of Urban Decay”

a miniature of a mah-jong supply store

a miniature of a restaurant called Sushi Noodle Guy

a miniature of a dumpster in front of a fence

a miniature of a dumpster with a hand reaching down to grab it

Australian artist Joshua Smith makes extremely detailed and realistic miniatures of grimy, graffitied buildings — he calls them “sculptures of Urban Decay”.

See also Gritty Miniatures of Classic NYC Street Objects.

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A Navajo Weaving of an Intel Pentium Processor

a Navajo weaving of a Pentium chip next to a microscopic image of the actual chip

In 1994, a Navajo/Diné weaver named Marilou Schultz made a weaving of the microscopic pattern of an Intel Pentium processor. (In the image above, the weaving is on the left and the chip is on the right.)

The Pentium die photo below shows the patterns and structures on the surface of the fingernail-sized silicon die, over three million tiny transistors. The weaving is a remarkably accurate representation of the die, reproducing the processor’s complex designs. However, I noticed that the weaving was a mirror image of the physical Pentium die; I had to flip the rug image below to make them match. I asked Ms. Schultz if this was an artistic decision and she explained that she wove the rug to match the photograph. There is no specific front or back to a Navajo weaving because the design is similar on both sides,3 so the gallery picked an arbitrary side to display. Unfortunately, they picked the wrong side, resulting in a backward die image.

Schultz is working on a weaving of another chip, the Fairchild 9040, which was “built by Navajo workers at a plant on Navajo land”.

In December 1972, National Geographic highlighted the Shiprock plant as “weaving for the Space Age”, stating that the Fairchild plant was the tribe’s most successful economic project with Shiprock booming due to the 4.5-million-dollar annual payroll. The article states: “Though the plant runs happily today, it was at first a battleground of warring cultures.” A new manager, Paul Driscoll, realized that strict “white man’s rules” were counterproductive. For instance, many employees couldn’t phone in if they would be absent, as they didn’t have telephones. Another issue was the language barrier since many workers spoke only Navajo, not English. So when technical words didn’t exist in Navajo, substitutes were found: “aluminum” became “shiny metal”. Driscoll also realized that Fairchild needed to adapt to traditional nine-day religious ceremonies. Soon the monthly turnover rate dropped from 12% to under 1%, better than Fairchild’s other plants.

The whole piece is really interesting and demonstrates the deep rabbit hole awaiting the curious art viewer. (via waxy)

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Can AI Make Art?

Ted Chiang with a thought-provoking essay on Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art:

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

In the past few years, Chiang has written often about the limitations of LLMs — you can read more about his AI views on kottke.org.

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Hand Drawn: Children’s Shoes, Given Away

drawings of children's shoes, ordered into six rows

This is lovely: illustrator & cartoonist Stephen Collins drew the progression of shoes worn by each of his three kids.

Back in 2020 we had to chuck the kids’ baby shoes out 😱, so I decided to keep the first ones and draw the rest, in order, starting with pre-walking socks.

When I look at photos of my kids from when they were younger, my eye is always drawn to their shoes and clothes — some of them are so iconic in my mind they almost function as logos for my kids at different stages.

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What’s In the Box? (The Olympics Medalists’ Box)

I haven’t watched too much of the Olympics this summer so maybe the announcers explain this every single time they show a medals ceremony, but in case you didn’t know, the long, thin boxes given to the medalists along with their medals contain the official poster of the Games (and a plushie).

illustration of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games

The poster was created by illustrator Ugo Gattoni and is a sort of Where’s Waldo / Busy Busy Town representation of the Games and its venues.

The designer had total creative freedom. While working to a brief and respecting the look of the Games, he still managed to maintain his own playful and joyful style.

This is why eight mascots are hidden within the posters. In fact, whatever age you are, there is something within the artwork that you will be able to enjoy.

The biggest images of the poster I can find are here if you want to zoom in to see the details. There are also zoomed-in images and videos on Gattoni’s Instagram.

The Olympic poster is the twin of the poster for the Paralympic Games, also created by Gattoni:

illustration of the 2024 Summer Paralympic Games

Together, they create one unified view of the 2024 Summer Games.

If you’d like to buy your own version of the poster, check out the official Olympics store.

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