64 posts tagged with art by Kattullus.
Displaying 1 through 50 of 64.
“We kept hoping the statue would be restored, but it never was”
In the 1950s, the Met began acquiring pieces from Robert E. Hecht, an American-born antiquities dealer who spent decades running afoul of authorities and was ultimately tried on charges of antiquities smuggling in Italy. In 1959 and 1961, Italian prosecutors charged Hecht with antiquities smuggling, and in 1973, they issued an arrest warrant for him that was later revoked. But the Met kept buying from him.–In search of stolen gods at the Met, the latest in a series on looted statues by the Nepali Times, focuses on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns “at least 1,109 pieces previously owned by people who had been either indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes”.
“Since 1995 Ai Weiwei has raised his middle finger to bastions of power”
Do you want Ai Weiwei to flip the bird at major landmarks, or anywhere else that’s findable on Google Maps? Here is his middle finger extended at the Kremlin. At the Leaning Tower of Pisa. At Mar-a-Lago. At Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík. At some guy on the South Pole. At a statue of a moomintroll in Tampere, Finland. Try it yourself and then read about the project here.
“there are ghosts in our machines and that our house pets have claws”
The Witching Cats of New Jersey is a short essay by artist and historian Kazys Varnelis about the fashion among the 19th century New Jersey merchant class of commissioning portraits of their cats in the guise of witches’ familiars, most of whom are now kept at the Germantown College Archives. This then becomes an essay about AI generated art, for obvious reasons.
“In internet terms, UbuWeb is antediluvian”
Your hat sucks is an essay by Gill Partington about the venerable web repository of avant-garde literature and art, UbuWeb, and its founder Kenneth Goldsmith. She discusses and expands on her essay in a wide-ranging podcast interview with Thomas Jones.
"the more elusive aspects of human experience"
Satanic Panics and the Death of Mythos by Aisling McCrea is an essay exploring how, in contemporary society, people want explanations that are "materially and logically and scientifically true", and ignore "non-literal or non-rational parts of our understanding of what is true: rituals, customs, superstition, storytelling, art, and transcendent experiences". She especially focuses on people's relationship with art, quoting Dan Olson's video essay Annihilation and Decoding Metaphor to explain how you can miss the deeper meaning of a piece of art, if you seek to explain everything logically.
“For those with a taste for the peculiar”
The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things is the blog of curator and art historian, Dr. Chelsea Nichols. The collection includes such treasures as sexy weasels in Renaissance art, how to scare children in the 1920s, and hidden mothers in Victorian portraits. There are also occasional guest posts, on topics including Ivan Bilibin’s Illustrations of Russian folklore by Claire Atwater, Robert Liston, a surgeon and a showman by Mike Crump, and a make-your-own-bat-colony activity sheet by Alice Fennessy.
A Museum of Nothing
No Show Museum is a museum dedicated to artworks which depict nothing in all its forms, as Notion, Statement, Lacuna, Reduction, Invisibility, Emptiness, Annihilation and Refusal. It features artworks by various well-known artists, such as Ai Weiwei, Yoko Ono, Marina Abramović, Karin Sander, lots and lots of Yves Klein, and many, many others. For more info on the artists and their works, click the little “i” sign next to their names. The “information” tab on the website will answer most of your questions, and two short videos will show you what exhibitions looks like.
Aeneas Fleeing from Troy (c. 1750) / He-Man Fleeing from Troi (2019)
Recreations of Famous Paintings of Myths Using Only My Children’s Toys from the series “By a Woman With Small Children and a PhD in Classics” on Eidolon, by Sarah Scullin, which also includes the posts The Definitive Latin Translation of “Baby Shark”, How to Travel Europe With Small Children, Writing While Mothering,
and A Woman with Small Children and a PhD in Classics Pitches Eidolon. Sarah Scullin’s other writings for Eidolon are worth checking out too.
RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ
The Spectacular Personal Mythology of Rammellzee by Hua Hsu is a fine introduction to the works of New York graffiti artist, sculptor, rapper, and painter Rammellzee, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 49. Known to hip hop afficionados for Beat Bop, his collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat and K-Rob, which was the subject of a Spin oral history. To get a feel for his aesthetic, this interview excerpted from the documentary Guerilla Art is a good place to start. If you want to know more, Alexxa Gotthardt wrote a good overview of his career and hip hop historian Dave Tompkins reminisced about Rammellzee and placed him in context.
"Martins seems to have needed light like she needed air"
A Visit to South Africa’s Strange, Astonishing Owl House is an article by Rosa Lyster [previously] about the art and life of outsider artist Helen Martins, and the museum of her work, The Owl House [previously discussed in 2002]. The Helen Martins Museum website has a gallery with high resolution photographs of her work and a few more can be seen here.
The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897
The Magus of Paris is an article by Alex Ross about Symbolist author and art impresario Joséphin Péladan, and the artists he championed in his The Salon de la Rose+Croix in the 1890s, which is the focus of the Guggenheim exhibition
Magical Symbolism. The website has various articles, including one about Symbolist poetry (with an accompanying SoundCloud page with readings) and another by Nat Trotman on putting on a 19 hour concert featuring only a single piece three and a half minutes in length called Vexations, by the best known participant in Péladan's salon, Erik Satie. New York Times' critic Joshua Barone staid for the whole duration. The first full performance of the piece was in 1963, organized by John Cage in New York and the Times covered it then too.
Images of classical Chinese artworks
The English-language website of Taiwan's National Palace Museum has over two thousand images available from its archive in high quality scans. You can search by keyword or browse by dynasty and category. For instance, you can take a look at Ming-era paintings, Song-era jade craftworks or Ch'ing-era ceramics. You can also download images from recent expeditions. If you haven't had your fill, you can then browse the museum's Chinese language websites for painting and antiquities, which have a combined 70 thousand images. If you don't know Chinese and want to use the search function, Google Translate might be of some help.
"A master gambler and his high-stakes museum."
Walsh agreed to pay Boltanski for the right to film his studio, outside Paris, twenty-four hours a day, and to transmit the images live to Walsh, in Tasmania. But the payment was turned into a macabre bet: the agreed fee was to be divided by eight years, and Boltanski was to be paid a monthly stipend, calculated as a proportion of that period, until his death. Should Boltanski, who was sixty-five years old, live longer than eight years, Walsh will end up paying more than the work is worth, and will have lost the bet. But if Boltanski dies within eight years the gambler will have purchased the work at less than its agreed-upon value, and won. "He has assured me that I will die before the eight years is up, because he never loses. He’s probably right," Boltanski told Agence France-Presse in 2009. "I don’t look after myself very well. But I’m going to try to survive." He added, "Anyone who never loses or thinks he never loses must be the Devil."—Tasmanian Devil is the story of David Walsh and his Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania, as told by recent Man Booker winner Richard Flanagan.
Why hello there, future recurring nightmare.
Space Replay is a floating black sphere that follows people around and plays back ambient sounds it has recorded. It was designed and built by Francesco Tacchini, Will Yates-Johnson and Julinka Ebhardt.
Soviet Futurism
Tekhnika Molodezhi was the Popular Mechanics of the Soviet Union. The magazine, whose name means Technology for the Youth, had illustrations of everything from space stations, computerized farming, transport of the future, friendly robots, to more abstract images. If you don't want to hunt through the archive, Mythbuster's Tested website has a gallery of 201 great images from the magazine.
"the whole rational creation formed a single dancing chorus"
The Dancing Saints is "a 3,000 square foot icon wrapping around the entire church rotunda, showing ninety larger-than life saints; four animals; stars, moons, suns and a twelve-foot dancing Christ." Among the icons are traditional saints like Francis of Assisi and Mary Magdalene, but most of them are non-traditional saints, like Florence Nightingale, John Coltrane and Lady Godiva's Horse. The Dancing Saints Icon is inside the St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. You can watch a video tour of the church's architecture, read an interview with iconographer Mark Dukes, and a short essay on the Dancing Saints Icon by Richard Fabian.
The Thinker at the Gates of Hell
A twenty-five minute doctumentary about Auguste Rodin's monumental sculpture "The Gates of Hell," which exists in two radically different versions. From the first version spring many of Rodin's best known sculptures, including his most famous, "The Thinker," originally conceived as a portrait of Dante gazing at Hell from above. It was never cast in bronze during his lifetime and was somewhat notorious for never having been completed, but is now considered to be one of the greatest sculptures of the modern era.
"Only the invented parts of our life had any meaning."
Living Well Is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins is a classic New Yorker profile of Gerald and Sara Murphy, central figures of the Lost Generation social circle in 1920s France. F. Scott Fitzgerald created Dick and Nicole Diver, the central couple of Tender Is the Night, by merging himself and his wife Zelda, with the Murphys. Gerald was a painter of note (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4), whose masterpiece has been lost. After seven years of painting, Murphy stopped, and never restarted, for a host of reasons, from the illness of his son to his closeted gayness. But the Murphys are probably best known for "the special quality of their life." They hosted parties and lived in a villa on the Mediterranean coast and were both painted by many artists, including Pablo Picasso. They were the subject of a recent biography and an essay collection.
"We cannot send 'The Dog' to the museum basement because it was on the apparently nonexisting second floor of the Quinta."
The Black Paintings is the title given to a series of works by Spanish artist Francisco Goya painted directly on the walls of his house from 1819-23. Their provenance has been doubted much like that of The Colossus, which has recently been attributed to Goya's assistant. Either way, the Black Paintings are masterpieces and have pride of place in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, which has put them all online in high resolution (you can save images to your computer in high resolution). [Goya previously]
Hokusai's Great Wave
The Great Wave off Kanagawa is probably the most iconic Japanese artwork in history, often used to illustrate tsunamis, and scientists have attempted to analyze what kind of wave it depicts. The woodprint is part of the 36 Views of Mount Fuji series, which depicts the famous mountain from different spots in Japan. The artist who made the Great Wave, Katsushika Hokusai, created thousands of images, many of which can be viewed online, such as in the internet galleries of the Museum of Fine Art and Visipix (Visipix' Hokusai page). Besides woodprints, Hokusai produced sketchbooks he called manga, one of which, number twelve, can be flipped through on the Swedish Touch and Turn website.
Chéri Herouard and La Vie parisienne
Two Flickr sets of 295 illustrations and 103 illustrations each (plus three more illustrations), by French artist Chéri Herouard who is most famous for his work for "naughty French magazine" La Vie parisienne from 1907 to his death. You can find some high quality scans from La Vie parisienne and more information about the magazine at Darwination Scans. Quite a few of the images are not safe for work. [via Kate Beaton]
"these little songs, and many like them, were made for the comfort of my friends, in their sorrow, doubt and suffering"
An internet search, even in these days of abundant information, yields only that the pamphlets can be found in various library collections, and that they continued to be produced into the '70s. And that Edmund Wilson once sent one, "Mr. P. Squiggle's Reward," to Nabokov, calling it "one of the oddest of many odd things that are sent me by unknown people." He also got the title wrong, dubbing it "Mr. P. Squiggle's Revenge," which is probably significant. But that’s it: nothing about Volk or McCalib.Epitomes was a series of pamphlets published by Elwin Volk and Dennis McCalib. Few traces of Volk's life are to be found, but he seems to have been a lawyer, and wrote at least a couple of pamphlets about law, which he self-published in Pasadena. McCalib is equally elusive. A man by that name contributed to an issue of One: The Homosexual Viewpoint in 1964. A Dennis McCalib also used the pseudonym Lord Fuzzy. The aforementioned "Mr. P. Squiggle's Reward" got a curt, two half-sentence dismissal in Poetry Magazine, otherwise these pamphlets seem not to have troubled the literary world. Someone donated their manuscripts to UCLA where they rest undigitized in fourteen boxes. But Library of Congress has scanned a total of twenty-six pages in high resolution.
"a monument to the decline of monuments"
After the highly publicized Bruce Lee monument was erected in Mostar, a city and municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2005, a series of similar ventures were initiated in rural Serbia. Some sociologists describe the glorification of nonpolitical celebrity figures as the result of an identity crisis caused by the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, a period when a once functioning multi-ethnic unity collapsed.— Turbo Sculpture is an essay by Aleksandra Domanović about sculptures of pop culture heroes, e.g. Bruce Lee, Rocky Balboa and Bob Marley, which have been placed or proposed in the nation-states that once comprised Yugoslavia. You can also watch a photo-illustrated reading of the essay voiced by a dead-pan British man. [via We Find Wildness]
Scottish artist Robert Montgomery and his billboards and neon signs
"Robert Montgomery works in a poetic and melancholic post-situationist tradition. He makes billboard pieces, recycled sunlight pieces and drawings." This one's my favorite but I like others too. Here are a few more examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
Simon Tookome, artist and whipper
"I'm proud of being recognized as an artist, but I really want to be known as someone with a special talent for the whip." Simon Tookoome, who passed away last year, was justly celebrated as an artist in his lifetime. You can view 39 of his pieces in The Canadian Art Database (including my favorite of his, the sculpture Shaman Wolf). But whipping was closer to his heart, and in his prime may have been the world's greatest whipper. Sadly, I could find no video of him from before 2000 on the internet, but here he is at 72. You can read a description of him at his peak in this condescending Time article about the 1972 Arctic Winter Games. And you can watch a few more Simon Tookoome videos here.
Drawings of Players in the Baseball Hall of Fame
Every Hall of Famer is a blog where Summer Anne Burton is drawing pictures of all 295 members of the baseball Hall of Fame. She started in January and plans to finish by the end of the year. Here's an interview with her about the project. The drawings include telling bits of information and cool quotes. It's a fun way to learn about baseball history. Here are three of my favorites so far: Charles Radbourne, Dan Brouthers and Grover Cleveland Alexander.
Art and Europe's Last Dictatorship
Fascinating and inspiring interview with playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard by Riz Khan on the subject of Belarus, a country ruled by the dictator Alexander Lukashenko, and whether artists can have an impact on the world of politics. Recently, the troupe Belarus Free Theatre has been touring the West with Being Harold Pinter, to rave reviews. Stoppard himself was a child refugee, escaping with his family from Czechoslovakia in 1939.
Five Cent Seurats
Four Color Process is a blog which reposts magnified details from old comic book panels. The images become semi-abstract and very striking (and surprisingly non-Lichtensteinian). Some favorites: Ruined City, Steranko's Strange Tales, Ghouls, Swirl Lamp, Kirby's Silver Surfer, Romance, Novelty Magic, Ditko's Dr. Strange, Man at Conference Table, Homo Comicus, Easy to Do and finally a comparison of contemporary printing with the old four color process. [via The Front Section]
Vintage children's illustration
Flickr user katinthecupboard has scanned and posted nearly 2000 vintage illustrations, largely from children's books. Luckily they have been organized into collections and sets, and extensively tagged. There's so much in there that I hesitate to point out any individual images I especially like, but here's a few starters: A foppish Mercury, freezing child Jesus in modern city, children playing with sunbeam, boy with a bone-whistle, dancing fairies, bathing silhouettes and sailing ship and merman riding a sea creature.
Japanese art
Nichibunken Databases isn't a link that sounds promising, but oh, what a treasure trove of old Japanese art it is. Among the many lovely collections is the Japanese folktales in foreign languages, another has maps, which is probably easiest to browse by decade, then there's the picture scrolls (some nsfw), and also illustrations from an 1870s world tour. That's just a small taste of what's there. If, like me, you don't read Japanese, often you'll be going in with scant information of what will be on offer, but even random stumblings will reveal beauty and wonder. Just to get you started, here are nearly 800 pictures of demons and over 2500 floating world woodprints. [Note: Blue dots mean the material is accessible to the public, red dots mean you have to have a login to see it]
Futurism in Russia
Tango With Cows is an exhibition by the Getty Museum of the book art of the Russian avant-garde from 1910 to 1917, which included a performance of sound poetry, all captured on video, both of Futurist poems, other historical sound poems, and contemporary works. Among performers are Christian Bök and Steve McCaffery. The exhibition takes its name from the book of ferro-concrete poems, one of 21 books can be downloaded as PDFs, most are by Alexei Kruchenykh but there are also works by Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Mayakovsky, David Burliuk, Andrei Kravtsov, Vasily Kamensky and Velimir Khlebnikov. These were all Futurists. [more inside]
Art by Alasdair Gray
Alasdair Gray is best known as a novelist but his illustrations of his own books have long fascinated and delighted. Here you can see hundreds of artworks by Alasdair Gray, including some book illustrations, from 1950 through 2009. Here are a few of his works that I like: unfinished Scottish Society of Playwrights poster, Nina Watching the Simpsons, Erics Watching Television, Ice Age and Babylonian Science, theatre poster for A Clockwork Orange and the Scots Hippo series. Also on the website there are a lot of articles about and by Alasdair Gray reposted from various publications. And finally, here's a podcast of a talk Alasdair Gray gave called The First Pictures I Enjoyed.
Caravaggio and Rembrandt, two great tastes that go well together
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam invites you to compare Caravaggio and Rembrandt. For an overview of Rembrandt's work here are Rembrandt van Rijn: Life and Work and A Web Catalogue of Rembrandt Paintings. For Caravaggio there's caravaggio.com which makes use of the Italian website Tutta l'opera del Caravaggio.
Iconodule website
The Temple Gallery in London has more than 200 items of Eastern Orthodox religious art, principally icons, on its website, both from the current exhibit as well as older pieces. Icons have been a part of Orthodox Christianity for centuries and they are loaded with meaning. The theology is elaborated upon in this essay on the history, principles and function of icons by iconographer Dr. George Kordis. One of the subjects of the essay is the Byzantine iconoclasm, a central event of which was the Seventh Ecumenical Council, depicted here in an icon. Here are some other icons I like: The Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia, St. Alypius the Stylite, Synaxis of the Archangels, Dormition of the Virgin and Presentation of Christ in the Temple. [Click on any image for a larger view]
Trimpin: Musical Sculptor
Seattle-based German artist Trimpin makes sculptural musical instruments. He was profiled in a mini-documentary by Washington public TV station KBTC a couple of years ago. Here are videos of some other works of art he's created, Fire Organ, Liquid Percussion, Cello, Sensors and Record Players, Contraption at Seattle-Tacoma Airport, MIDI-controlled Player Piano and Sheng High.
Kyle Gann wrote an essay by that placed Trimpin in the tradition of John Cage, Harry Partch and other avant-garde American musical inventors. The audio of a nearly hour and a half long 1990 interview with Trimpin by Charles Amirkhanian can be downloaded from the Internet Archive. Another, more light-hearted interview in connection to his show at this year's SXSW, where a documentary about him premiered (trailer).
Arts & Crafts Videos from Etsy
Etsy has a YouTube channel where they have all kinds of profiles of their users and how-to guides. My two favorite series are the Process series (e.g. New Books with Old Materials & Tin Toys) and Handmade Portraits (e.g. Armor Guitars & Wood Mosaics). In the description of each video there is a link to the corresponding entry on Etsy's blog, The Storque. The blogposts have more information on the users and sometimes further links and videos. [via Work in Progress]
Wriston Art Center Galleries Digital Collection
The Wriston Art Center Galleries Digital Collection at Lawrence University has over 1500 images of various artworks, focusing especially on prints & printmaking and ancient coins. All can be viewed in extremely high resolution (click "export image" above the artwork). Here are a few I particularly like: Beginning of Winter (Japanese woodcut), Rising Sun (Paul Klee painting), From Distant Lands (watercolor), Three Kings (Jacques Villon engraving), Untitled I (netting) and Noble Lady and Prince (Japanese woodcut).
Arborglyphs in Nevada
Sheepherders in Northern Nevada came largely from Basque country back in the day. They brought with them a tradition of making arborglyphs, carving text and images into living trees. You can see pictures of 175 Nevada arborglyphs here, 73 of which have companion videos showing a bit more of the surrounding. The unquestioned expert on Nevadan arborglyphs, Professor Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, has written a great deal on the subject and in 2001 he wrote a good overview article in Forest History Today called Carving Out History: The Basque Aspens. Another good introductory article by journalist Emma Nichols in the Sacramento News & Review, Mystery of the Arborglyphs, with a focus on the more salacious arborglyphs. Basque Tree Carving: Legend in Nevada is an 18 minute documentary. Here is a video of Professor Mallea speaking about the arborglyphs and here is an interview with him. [all videos asx format]
ImprovArt
ImprovEverywhere has a gallery opening in the New York Subway. "In the course of making the art labels, the mundane stuff of the platform really did become weirdly compelling and beautiful. I wasn’t sure if everyone else would have that experience, or if we would be busy consciously pretending that these random objects were art. In the course of the event, some other friends who came made brilliant observations about the pieces that helped bring my mindset firmly back into of-course-this-is-art, rather than viewing the subway as a collection of quick fixes over time. It’s wonderful how we can decide to create a collective reality, and how it can sometimes catch us up within itself. I’m glad other folks also got caught up in "Wow.. This might really be art!", and that some non-agents got such a kick out of it!"
Zines!
The Zine Library has hundreds of zines in pdf format for your perusal. They are organized into categories ranging from the common political (anarchism, political prisoners & animal liberation) and identity based zines (indigenous, race & gender) to the more esoteric (anarchist history, primitivism & theory) as well as the useful (cooking, DIY & organizing manuals) and arty (art, comics & music). Now, zines are by their very nature hit and miss but there are some real treasures to be found. I recommend these three: [all links pdf] The Rebel's Dark Laughter - The Writings of Bruno Filippi, Barefoot in the Kitchen and Delivery from Below, Resistance from Above - Electricity and the Politics of Struggle in Tembisa, South Africa. Note: Many if not most zines are set up to be printed out and bound together in chapbooks. That requires a bit of going back and forth when reading in pdf-format, but they wouldn't be real zines if they were straightforward to read ;) Don't know what a zine is? A pretty good overview is provided by zine librarian Jenna Freedman in Zines Are Not Blogs: A Not Unbiased Analysis. [This site has been posted previously but was buried deep in the weeds of more inside]
French Drawings
The Essence of Line is a collection of over 900 drawings by French artists "from Ingres to Degas" by the Baltimore Museum of Art. I'd link to some highlights but the site did such a stellar job of it that I'll just direct you there. They also have some sketchbooks. Note that some of the drawings have short essays about them. As a related link, here is the famous Demonographia, with drawings of demons by Louis Breton and descriptions by Collin de Plancy.
Artists' Books Online
Artists' Books Online is a collection by the University of Virginia of artists' books. Artists' books are works of art that take the form of books and are often both text and visual art. Either way, they're awful interesting to look at. Here are some artbooks to get you started: How to Humiliate Your Peeping Tom by Susan Baker, The Word Made Flesh by Johanna Drucker, Life in a Book by Francois Deschamps, A.A.A.R.P. by Clifton Kirkpatrick Meador, opuntia is just another name for a prickly pear by Todd Walker and Black Dog White Bark by Erica Van Horn
The digital collection of the Tokyo National Museum
The digital collection of the Tokyo National Museum is full of wonder. TNM is the oldest museum in Japan and collects archaeological objects and art from Japan as well as other parts of Asia. The collection can be browsed by type or region. Here are some of my favorites: Buddha's life, The name "Korin" given to pupil, Tale of Matsuranomiya, Coquettish type, Tea caddy in shape of bucket with handle, Mirror, design of sea and island, Traditionary identified as Minamoto no Yoritomo, Seated Monju Bosatsu (Manjusri) and attendants, Sword mounting of kazari-tachi type and (my current desktop background) Figures under a tree. This is but a small sampling of all that can be found in the digital collection
The Islamic art collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Islamic art collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has beautiful objects to delight every fancy, whether you seek manuscript illustration (more), calligraphy (more), glassware (more), archetectural elements (more) and much, yes, more! If you want some knowledge to go with the beauty then you are in luck because on the site there is an overview of Islamic art history from inception to the now.
Camouflage art
Two artists that paint humans so that they blend into their surroundings: Liu Bolin and Emma Hack (click 'body art' and then 'exhibitions' to get into the image galleries)
The Political Cartoons of Clifford K. Berryman
The political cartoons of Clifford K. Berryman lampooned American politics from the era of Grover Cleveland to the Truman administration. If he's known today it's mostly for having originated the teddy bear. While some of his cartoons have scant relevance today, many remain surprisingly relevant. Of the many historical events he drew there are women's suffrage, the 1948 election and the 1912 Republican primaries between Taft and Roosevelt.
Floating World
Viewing Japanese Prints is an encyclopedia of Floating World art (or ukiyo-e) and related genres. It has lots of images to go with the articles. Once you've gone through the site and familiarized yourself with pre-modern Japanese printmaking you might want to browse through the humongous image archive of Tokyo Metropolitan Library. Here are a few images that caught my eye: musicians attempt to keep a lady entertained, samurai pirate jumps into the water, crazed sea-captain wields very big axe, two samurais in combat, elfin man watches split-tailed cat dance while a giant feline stares angrily and giant toad belches up samurai while another samurai fights a gigantic fish and a third samurai observes the action from the banks of a river.
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Posters from 1880-1918 in huge resolution
Art of the Poster 1880-1918 has high-quality scans of 162 posters. The images can either be viewed through a zooming window in the browser or exported in enormous resolutions (export image link in top left corner of image page). Here are some of my favorite posters: Scribner's Fiction Number, Between the Acts All Tobacco Cigarettes, Palais de la Danse, Starnberger-see, Read the Sun, Cercle Artistique de Schaerbeek, Bosch-licht, XXV Ausstellung Secession and Cabaret du Chat Noir.
Fowler Museum of Cultural History
The UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History has an extensive, searchable online collection. It focuse on material art and household items and has objects from all over the world. The website can be browsed either by geographic orgin: Africa, Asia, North and Central America, Pacific, South America, or through its two exhibits, Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives and Fowler in Focus. Some of my favorite objects (but really, everything is entrancing) are The Blind Scholar (a Taiwanese handpuppet), Chikunga (a Zambian mask) and a stirrup spout bottle which looks like a puma eating a piglet (Peruvian). All items have accompanying descriptions and some have short texts or audioguides with further information.
Art Deco
Art Deco was the dominant style of the interwar era, coming out of Paris in the 1920's and ruling the roost until World War II broke out. Randy Juster's Decopix - The Art Deco Resource has enough pictures of Art Deco architecture to send one hurtling into The Gernsback Continuum. If that's not enough then there's always the 11000+ images of the Flickr Art Deco Pool. But Art Deco wasn't just about architecture. On the Victoria and Albert Musem's Art Deco site one can view Art Deco objects in great detail, rotating them and listening to audio lectures on each object. But before Art Deco was a design aesthetic it was an art-style. Illustrations for the Art Deco Book in France has more than 170 images from the proponents of that then-new style (some images are not safe for work, especially in the George Barbier section).
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