March 15, 2005
Better in Color?
Save Raging Bull, I'm really not a big fan of black and white movies (and even this Scorsese masterpiece cuts to color for part of the movie). And while I do love black and white photographs, I think this collection of color photographs from World War I gives a truer sense of the reality of the time period. Note that these are not B&W photos that have been colored in with a computer program. They are actual color photos developed using Auguste and Louis Lumière's autochrome process invented in 1903.
I previously wasn't aware that such pictures even existed. Head over and take a look at the collection. For those (like me) who don't speak French, just click on the city names in the upper right hand corner to view some of the galleries.
Hat Tip: Thanks to Jim Glass for the link.
Posted by Peter Mork at 11:48 AM | Comments | TrackBack
Better in Color?
Save Raging Bull, I'm really not a big fan of black and white movies (and even this Scorsese masterpiece cuts to color for part of the movie). And while I do love black and white photographs, I think this collection of color photographs from World War I gives a truer sense of the reality of the time period. Note that these are not B&W photos that have been colored in with a computer program. They are actual color photos developed using Auguste and Louis Lumière's autochrome process invented in 1903.
I previously wasn't aware that such pictures even existed. Head over and take a look at the collection. For those (like me) who don't speak French, just click on the city names in the upper right hand corner to view some of the galleries.
Hat Tip: Thanks to Jim Glass for the link.
Posted by Peter Mork at 11:48 AM | Comments | TrackBack
November 15, 2004
Helprin and Art
Last week my brother met Mark Helprin, one of my favorite authors, at a book signing in the Bay Area. Apart from being an imaginative story writer, Helprin incorporates artwork into his novels in a way that makes me wish he was an art history professor back when I was in college.
With the current state of affairs in Iraq, I was reminded of the conclusion of this essay where he gives a special meaning to one of Winslow Homer's masterpieces:
When I was in the army, many years ago, I was an infantryman, and in the course of what I saw, and did, and came to understand, I was broken. Sometime after I had returned to the United States and my life had resumed, I rounded a corner in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and saw a painting I had known all my life but which I had not until that moment been able to understand. This was Winslow Homer’s masterfully restrained portrait of a veteran returning to his fields. The generation touched by fire in the Civil War understood the great import of this painting, they knew why the veteran had his back turned to the painter, why he was alone, why he worked in utter quiet, why the light was so clear, the scene so tranquil. After years of war and destruction, they understood, and after having passed this painting for the first time as a man, so did I.
As if there had never been a Gettysburg, an Antietam, or a Chancellorsville, the light struck the soil and the wheat grew. The world was the same. The essential rules had not changed. Devastation had not triumphed. The veteran could return to his fields, and the answer to his tentativeness was that, as if by a miracle, they were now even richer than he had remembered them.
Update: My brother just forwarded along another relevant quote from Helprin. It is from a speech called "Defend Civilization Itself" and is equally poetic and powerful:
If civilization can be attacked on many fronts, it can also be defended on many fronts, and to do so you need not necessarily drop into Afghanistan by parachute or found a political party. Last summer, in Venice, I was walking from room to room in the Accademia, which, unlike timid American museums, throws its windows wide open to the light and air of day. As if to bring even further alive the greatness and truth of the Bellinis and the Giorgiones on the walls, the galleries were flooded with music. As is most everything in Italy, it was unofficial. It came from a guitarist and a soprano on a side street. He played while she sang gloriously Bach, Handel, Mozart, and anonymous folk songs of the 18th Century. Because it was music, I cannot properly convey to you how beautiful it was, but it was accomplished, precise, and infused with the ineffable quality that lifts great art above that which merely aspires to or pretends to be great art. I could not see them from the windows, but when, several hours later, I went outside, they had neither ceased, nor skipped a beat, nor produced a single false note.
They were impoverished Poles, who appeared to be in their late twenties. She was thin, sharp-featured, and hauntingly beautiful. Most people simply passed them by, some dropped a few coins in a basket at her feet, and the visitors to the Accademia had no idea who they were, but she sang as if she were bathed in the footlights of La Scala, where she should have been, and where someday she may be. It did not matter that they were unrecognized, that they sang on the street, or that they were desperately poor, because that day in Venice they rose above everyone else, except perhaps the saints. In this they shared a brotherhood with the American soldier who made the first parachute jump, in the dark, into Afghanistan. For they and he were defending the civilization of the West, and they and he are inextricably linked. Without the soldier, they could not exist except in subjugation, and without them, he would not have enough to fight for.