Paintings of Portugal & Paintings of Italy

 
 
Paintings of Portugal

by Angela Pan

self-published
2024
 

 

Paintings of Italy
by Angela Pan
self-published

2024 

 
 
Paintings of Portugal and Paintings of Italy are a pair of self-published art books by Canadian artist Angela Pan. They're similar to Pan's earlier Paintings of Japan books that I read previously, though longer - the "Japan" books were about 40 pages each, while Portugal and Italy are about double that.
 
Paintings of Portugal collects city scenes from three trips Pan made to Portugal from 2021 to 2024. Italy covers two trips there from around the same time; it's mostly views of the city, but includes a few countryside landscapes from Tuscany and the Dolomite mountains. Pan paints using acrylic, and her paintings use a mix of bright colors and pastels. There's not a drop of black or brow or gray here - nothing is drab; everything is the color of candy.
 
The paintings are accompanied by a sort of travel diary describing where Pan went and what scenes she sought out. She's an intensely crepuscular painter - most of her scenes are captured in the 'golden hour' after sunrise or before sunset or the 'blue hour' before it's up or after it's down. In Portugal, she was usually able to find an elevated viewpoint to capture the cities from above; in Italy more of them are from ground level.
 
Pan has visibly grown as an artist since her earlier books, and I was most aware of the refinement of her technique in Portugal. That book also benefits from the relative novelty of its subjects. Lisbon and Porto and the like are simply much less scene in art than Venice and Rome and such. If I had one complaint, it's that I wish she'd say a bit more about the places she visits beyond naming the cities and describing the walks to and from her chosen viewpoints.

FOUND Polaroids

  
 
FOUND Polaroids

by FOUND Magazine

Quack! Media

2006 

 

 

FOUND Polaroids is a small art book published by the creators of FOUND Magazine, showing off some of their collection of Polaroid pictures. FOUND was a collective art project started in the early 2000s. The founders, Davy Rothbart and Jason Bitner, used the internet to solicit people to send them things they found that other people has lost, especially things like old notes and pictures. FOUND Magazine then curated the submissions and published a zine, then a magazine, then several books. In my mind, I place it in the same category as PostSecret.
 
I'm not completely sure of the criteria for photos in this book, beyond that they're Polaroids. (Surely their storehouse of regular film photos is much fuller.) Are these the best, the most interesting, or an attempt at a representative selection? Each two-page spread has a photo, the name of the sender, where it was found, and sometimes some additional context, like the circumstances of the find, or the sender's thoughts about what the photo depicts. These vary quite a bit in length, from just the bare facts conveyed in a handful of words (tweet-length with characters left over) up to a couple paragraphs.
 
There are no chapters or section breaks, but the photos are mostly grouped by topic. There are photos of parents with children, teens, parties, home interiors (including several bathrooms), cars, home exteriors, damaged or graffitied photos, people with pets, people with Santa, people with friends. 
 
Some of the photos seem like real losses - sentimental images the owner probably wanted to keep, sometimes discovered after an eviction. Others kind of seem like trash, not so much lost as littered or dropped. They vary in condition, mostly clean, a few pretty dirty and scuffed up, none pristine. 
 
Some of the photos, quite frankly, are boring. Some were so dark or blurry you could scarcely see anything, a couple were extreme close ups of stairs or walls, and some are just dull because they show an ugly, undistinguished landscape, shot with no sense of composition. I'd throw them away too! But the photos of people tended to be more interesting, if only because you might wonder what they're doing, what their relation is to each other or their photographer. One of the damaged photos had been found in a puddle, and the image was discolored as a result, which I thought was fascinating. 

The Golden Mean

 
The Golden Mean

In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine Concludes
by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1993

 

 

The Golden Mean is the last book in Nick Bantock's original trilogy of epistolary art books about the long-distance romance between Griffin and Sabine. 
 
The series started with British artist Griffin Moss receiving a homemade postcard from a woman he never met, Sabine Strohem, who lives on a South Pacific island. He replied back with a homemade card of his own, and soon they both found they were falling in love. Sabine is also an artist; she designs stamps for the island government. And she has a psychic connection to Griffin, which is why she contacted him initially.
 
Then Sabine decided to fly to London to visit Griffin. Faced with the prospect of meeting his penpal dreamgirl in real life, Griffin panicked and went on a trip around the world to find himself. Sabine stayed in Griffin's loft, and they continued trading postcards and letters. Sabine would have to go back to the island soon, so Griffin plucked up his courage and came home, only to find his loft empty... Strangely, the date on Sabine's last card sent from London suggests the overlapped by a week without seeing each other.
 
The Golden Mean leans a bit more into the supernatural elements of the story. Griffin finally develops a psychic connection back to Sabine, just as hers to him starts mysterious waning. They wonder if they're living on parallel worlds, or what else it could be. (Normally I might refer to this as a Lake House plot, except Bantock wrote this over a decade before The Lake House!) A menacing man starts following Sabine around the island, claiming to be a scientist who studies psychics, who wants to examine her and Griffin. The strange man starts writing postcards to Griffin too. Sabine and Griffin know they need to meet, and to escape the scientist, so they agree to find each other at the Pharaoh's Gate in Egypt. 
 
Later, an African doctor gets a mysterious postcard from Sabine that suggests she and Griffin have married and had a child...
 
Although The Golden Mean concludes the trilogy, it's clear there's more story ahead! As usual, Bantock infuses the postcards and letters with the characters' personalities. Griffin's cards are more surreal, and his handwriting is neat and precise. He types his letter. Sabine's cards use more collage, she handwrites everything in cursive in what looks like fountain pen ink. The mysterious stranger uses Sabine-designed stamps, but his postcards are store-bought unlike the ones the penpals make for each other. I suppose I'll continue reading to learn what happens next!

Sabine's Notebook

 
 
Sabine's Notebook

In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine Continues
by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1992

 

 

Sabine's Notebook is the second book in Nick Bantock's trilogy of novels about a pair of artists who are separated across the globe, but share a kind of psychic connection, and communicate in letters and postcards. Bantock's work blends the epistolary novel with the art book, as each postcard and envelope are illustrated, each letter has an actual envelope it can be removed from, and everything is written in the specific handwriting of the artists, Griffin and Sabine.
 
In the first book, Sabine reached out to Griffin because she'd finally learned who he was and how to reach him, after a lifetime of being able to (sometimes?) see through his eyes. Griffin is an illustrator living in London; Sabine lives on a small island in the South Pacific and designs the island's stamps. For Sabine, the chance to talk to Griffin is the fulfillment of a dream. Griffin is intrigued by Sabine but also fears her, and fears that he's imagining her or going insane. The first book ended with Sabine announcing she was coming to visit Griffin, but then arriving to find his apartment empty.
 
Now in Sabine's Notebook, we learn that Griffin has essentially fled in terror, afraid to actually meet the dream girl who, he's afraid, might really be just a dream. Sabine seems awfully understanding as he writes to her (at his own home address) from Italy, Greece, Japan, Australia. She's enjoying the city and its museums, though she'll eventually have to go back home. 
 
Griffin is clearly going through some sort of spiritual or psychological crisis, though I found myself thinking that world travel wouldn't really solve anything, and that he ought to see a therapist, and especially that he ought to face his fears and just go meet Sabine already. I can understand building something up in your mind so that you fear disappointment if you actually do it, but he's not even really choosing the idea of Sabine over actually meeting her. He must understand that if he keeps avoiding her, he could lose her as a pen pal too.
  
The pair repeatedly affirm that they are in love with one another, and Sabine in particular has the patience of a saint. When Griffin finally returns home, near Sabine's deadline for leaving, he finds her already gone ... but then the last postcard in the book is from her, from his address, asking why he never made it back like he said he would!
 
I'm curious to see how this situation will be resolved. I wonder if we'll learn that the pair are somehow separated in time as well as space. I don't really know, but that's my guess. Poor Sabine! Regardless of whatever supernatural is going on, she's in love with a man who prefers to keep her at a distance and to communicate in the slowest, most attenuated way possible. Bantock's artwork is again evocative - suggestive and dream-like - which fits the mood of the book and the personality of the two artists well. 

Heavenly Bodies

 
Heavenly Bodies

Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs

by Paul Koudounaris

Thames & Hudson

2013

 

 

Heavenly Bodies is a nonfiction history of an all-but-forgotten Catholic tradition from the Counter Reformation, the exhuming, decorating, and displaying of 'catacomb saints' - skeletons from the Roman catacombs, elaborately decorated with precious metals and gemstones, housed as relics in churches and monasteries, primarily in Germany and Austria. Author and photographer Paul Koudounaris visited a number that once housed catacomb saints, and a few that still do, to learn their history, see them in their present condition, and document them with photographs. There are so many photos, this is practically an art book! The text too, could stand alone, but benefits greatly from being able to see the relics.
 
Catacomb saints are an invented tradition, an innovation by the Catholic Church in the late 1500s, a response to the Protestant Reformation generally, and more specifically, to the looting and destruction of relics from some Catholic churches that some Protestants carried out in the name of reform. If the early Protestants were iconoclasts, Catholic leaders hoped to win back lapsed believers and strengthen the resolve of their faithful by leaning into this contrast, and decorating their churches with impressive new icons. New catacomb saints were delivered to German churches mostly during the 1600s, but new deliveries continued into the 1800s, albeit at a slower pace.
 
Producing a mass supply of revered dead, all at once, a millennium and a half after the founding of their religion, confronted Catholic leaders with an interesting manufacturing problem. Plenty of new saints had been canonized over time, but they (and their remains) were all already accounted for. But the Roman catacombs might hold an untold number of early Christian corpses, and before the religion was legalized by Constantine in the early 300s, many of them might be martyrs. The catacombs would also contain the remains of Roman pagans and Jews, plus non-martyred Christians. So how could you tell which entombed remains were martyrs? And how could you be sure of finding enough martyrs to supply all the parishes in Germany that you wanted to decorate?
 
The answer of course is to use sloppy, ambiguous criteria that produce a lot of false positives, and to insist that every positive you produce is authentic and legitimate. You need both methods that lie, and to convince yourself that really, they're producing the truth. Sociologist Kai Erikson wrote about this in Wayward Puritans, how the early American religious communities kept counting more and more frivolous offenses as 'crimes' in order to continue punishing a consistent number of community members for misbehavior. But you see it wherever leaders set a quota and authorize those below them to meet it in whatever way they can justify. So you'll see it in police forces that use traffic tickets and civil asset forfeiture to collect revenue, in corporations that set profit targets that can't be met legally. You see it in the software Republican officials use to find voters to disenfranchise, in the guidelines Trump's immigration enforcers use to identify people with no criminal records as gang members who can be arrested and deported, in the AI software Netenyahu's army uses to label Palestinians as members of Hamas who can be targeted for execution by drone strike. You see it in the buggy equipment ghost hunters use to generate proof of hauntings, and the statistical tricks scientists can deploy to produce a significant but irreplicable finding. Anyway, with their process in place, Catholic relic-hunters in Rome found enough skeletons to meet the demand, and felt confident in labeling each of them as martyrs, calling them saints, assigning them names, even if the burial markers were unreadable. Insisting on better, more truthful criteria, even at the cost of not having enough, tends to be the domain of critics. In the case of the catacomb saints, the critics were easy to ignore at first, but were eventually persuasive enough to halt the practice.
 

 
Skeletons from Rome were 'articulated,' or wired into a posed whole, and decorated with embroidered cloth, beads and buttons, strings of pearls, mounted gemstones, and wires and settings of gold. They were shipped to the heart of Protestant country and seen as weapons for Catholicism. They're supposed to symbolize God's power and generosity, and the luxurious conditions that await all believers in heaven. To modern eyes, they look quite strange. They are at once macabre, morbid, shocking in the amount of wealth each one displays, and also almost unbelievably gaudy and tacky. This is the Catholic faith at its most glamorous, it's most goth. It's not surprising worshipers felt awed by them. There is one contemporary motif I'm aware of that resembles catacomb saints though - the flower bedecked skull illustrations associated with the Mexican Day of the Dead. The idea of claiming dead people, who possibly belonged to other faiths, and recruiting them into present-day religious practice also reminds me a bit of the posthumous baptisms carried out by the Mormon Church.
 
Once decorated, the skeletons would be displayed in churches across Germany, usually very prominently, and it seems they were successful in invigorating worshipers, including attracting pilgrims and inspiring cash donations. Many congregations devoted a special day to their saint once a year, when the body in its protective glass case might even be removed from the church and sent on parade before returning to its place of honor.
 
Catholicism is rare among religions for displaying a revering relics. The Protestant criticisms (eventually taken up by Catholic leaders during the Enlightenment in the 1800s) were both religious and aesthetic. The religious complaint is that the public doesn't understand sophisticated theological arguments about how the visible relic is the symbol of a saint who intercedes between God and the congregation to amplify their prayers - the complaint is that people worship the bones directly, and attribute miracles to the physical object, not the soul of the saint, or to god. And indeed, each relic accumulated a growing list of supposed miracles over the years, most often injuries healed and illnesses cured. The aesthetic argument is that they're silly and ugly and old fashioned. And of course, the gold and jewels are attractive targets for both criminal theft and legal confiscation.
 
Very few churches that received catacomb saints still have them, and many that remain are hidden away in storage, in attics and closets. Most of the disposals took place during the Enlightenment, when secular German leaders and Catholic authorities alike decided to hide or dispose of what they'd come to see as an embarrassing legacy, often despite the wishes and objections of everyday churchgoers who still valued the relics. That was one thing that struck me, throughout Koudounaris's account of history - how often leaders of all kinds made unilateral decisions about how the people under them ought to believe and worship, and how often those decisions were premised on the idea that the common people were stupid and must be doing it wrong.

Une Semaine De Bonte

 
 
Une Semaine De Bonte

A Surrealistic Novel in Collage

by Max Ernst

Dover

1934, reprinted 1976

 

 

Une Semaine De Bonte is the Dover Press reprint of Dada artist Max Ernst's series of five collage pamphlets, whose collective title translates to A Week of Kindness. It's slightly tempting to claim that Ernst invented the photocopy cut-up zine with this series. The first four pamphlets / zines / chapters are each named for a weekday, Sunday through Wednesday. The fifth covers Thursday to Saturday; Thursday is further divided into two sections, Friday into three.
 
This is an art book but not, I don't think, a graphic novel, because the images don't seem to be sequential or to convey any narrative. Ernst made collages by cutting up and reassembling lithograph illustrations. In this case, he used whole images from popular fiction and embellished them with details from like, Gustave Dore's fantasy and Bible art. If the illustrations are anything to go by, publishers at the time put out a lot of the same kinds of things we like today - mysteries and true crime, romances and domestic soap-operatic dramas full of affairs, rivalries, jealousies, conflict between attractive nicely-dressed people in well-furnished houses. But the embellishments take those familiar scenes and make them surreal and uncanny.
 
Each day is associated with an element and an example. Sunday is mud, and the Lion of Belfort, a famous French statue. The images in this section show men with lion's heads, wearing in suits or police or military uniforms. They're variously wooing, dating, or kidnapping and holding captive topless and naked women. (Probably most of the women in the book are like that, but especially in this chapter.)
 
In addition to the changes to the people, Ernst added other strange details to many of the scenes. Any mirror or portrait or statue now shows a naked woman instead of whatever was originally there. And the pictures are invaded by life - a giant blood vessel from an anatomical diagram, a sword replaced by a femur, a bird with the face of a state, the Sacred Heart of Jesus. And so on.
 
Monday's element is water, and the example is water. Here we have women, nude or in nightgowns or showgirl costumes, and we have ocean waves infiltrating domestic spaces, often while men stand around looking stern and confused. In several, the women are in bed sleeping, and it looks like they're dreaming the water, like their dreams have become real, as the ocean replaces their bedroom floors.
 
Tuesday's element is fire, its example the Court of the Dragon. These are mostly scenes in ballrooms and parlors. In most scenes there is a dragon, or perhaps a snake or bat. In most scenes, someone has bat or bird wings. Often someone is crying. Why so much despair?

On Wednesday the element is blood, the example is Oedipus. Men with various birds' heads commit acts of violence, fighting, shooting, stabbing, carrying off tied-up naked women (again, as on Sunday), or running away. There are huge feathers and giant insects about.
 
Thursday is blackness, its first example is the rooster's laughter. Roosters and men with the heads of roosters abound, committing more acts of violence. The nude women here are being accosted or tortured, or else they are corpses. Pools of dark blood mar the floors. The men crow in triumph for their misdeeds. The second example is Easter Island. Men with moai statue heads lurk behind curtains, spying on women, watching jealously the embrace between ordinary, human-headed lovers.
 
Friday's element is the Interior of Sight, and its example is Three Visible Poems. It's divided into sections. In the first, Ernst has collaged together images of plants and sections of anatomical drawings, especially skeletons. In the second has a lot of shoes. The third is just two images - a row of disembodied shaking hands that recedes toward the vanishing point, and two rows of eyes, looking at each other, that does the same.
 
Saturday, the element is unknown, the example, the Key to Songs. We see women in bed, in postures like they're falling or suffering violence, their faces frightened or angry.
 
I would say that Ernst succeeded in creating a lot of striking, provocative imagery. In part though, his success comes from the provocation of seeing so much violence committed against nude women by fully clothed men, images that must have been popular enough in the fiction of his time, that he could find so many examples to work with. I especially liked the water images, where it seemed like the boundary between dream and life had ruptured, and the ocean poured through the tear.

Griffin and Sabine

 
 
Griffin and Sabine

An Extraordinary Correspondence

by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1991 

 

 

Griffin and Sabine is both an art book and an epistolary novel - it is a story told in the letters exchanged between the title characters, letters that are beautifully, even tactilely reproduced on the book's pages. On the first page is the image of a postcard. Turn the page, and on the back is the image of the back of the card, handwritten message, address, stamps, airmail notice, and all. Each page is like this. Some are full letters. Again, first you see the image of the front of the envelope. Then, not just an image, but an envelope fixed to the page. Open it and take out the letter to read. This is a remarkably hands-on book.
 
The first card is from Sabine. She lives on a small island in the South Pacific. Griffin lives in London. Sabine has a kind of magical or psychic connection to Griffin, and is reaching out to establish conscious, verbal contact. Griffin is initially skeptical, then surprised, but as they exchange postcards, they quickly develop rapport, and learn enough about each other to realize they make good friends, regardless of how they've met.
 
Griffin has a small stationary shop and designs postcards professionally. Sabine works for the island government designing stamps, which are popular enough with international collectors to be a good source of revenue. They share their life stories, their views on art. Their friendship maybe begins to turn into attraction. Griffin seems to be the more reserved of the two; Sabine the more free-spirited.
 
I'm not sure if their unusual meeting and exchange of letters is the catalyst (although it seems like it is), but for whatever reason, Griffin starts decompensating, and begins falling into depression. The end of the book is clearly just a pause in the story, as one of the pair makes a plan to visit the other in person.

I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail

 
 
I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail

art by Ramsingh Urveti

Tara Books

2012

 

 

Ramsingh Urveti only credits himself as the illustrator of I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail, perhaps because the text of the book consists of only the title poem, a folk poem from England in the 1600s, and according to the preface, often included in collections of poetry for children. Urveti's version takes the form of a children's picture book, and the poem is simple enough to be enjoyed by children; but I think adults can enjoy this as well.
 
The poem's first few lines go like this:
"I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
I saw a comet drop down hail
I saw a cloud with ivy circled around..."
 
Read this way, it's a series of strange images. But the poem's 'trick' is that it can be read another way, no longer rhyming, but making perfect sense.
"I saw a peacock

With a fiery tale, I saw a comet
Drop down hail, I saw a cloud..."
 
Urveti's art allows both readings at once. Each two-page has one of his black-and-white ink drawings, and a half-stanza of text. Each also has a hole in the paper that reveals the next half-stanza. So it reads more like this:
"I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
With a fiery tail, I saw a comet
I saw a comet drop down hail
Drop down hail, I saw a cloud
I saw a cloud with ivy circled around..."
 
At the beginning, the cut-outs only show text, but as the book continues, they reveal glimpses of art too, and the cut-outs themselves become an increasingly important part of each new drawing.
 
I don't know why, exactly, but this book feels very appropriate for the Solstice and New Year. Perhaps the images of darkness, of lights in the sky, perhaps the way the dual readings suggest transformation.

Paintings of Japan Autumn & Paintings of Japan Spring

 
Paintings of Japan - Autumn

by Angela Pan

self-published

adapted from the zine 21 Days in Japan by Angela Pan 

2019, reprinted 2023

 

Paintings of Japan - Spring

by Angela Pan

self-published

2023

 

 

Paintings of Japan - Autumn and Paintings of Japan - Spring are a pair of art books by Angela Pan about two trips she took to Japan in 2019 and 2022. Autumn is an expanded reprinting of Pan's earlier art zine 21 Days in Japan, and Spring is wholly new. On both trips, she was based in Tokyo, and took additional day-trips by train.
 
In each book, Pan pairs essays about each site with a series of paintings she made there. Mount Fuji and historic Kyoto get plenty of space in both. Spring also features a lot of cherry blossoms. Each book is only about 40 pages long, so while these are bigger than zines, they're still quick reads.

Pan paints in acrylics. Her art is bright and colorful with lots of pinks and oranges, blues and purples. I felt like I noticed some improvement over the two books. The images in Spring seem a both tighter and more detailed than the ones in Autumn.

On the other hand, the art in Autumn seems a bit more varied and experimental. Pan includes images of food, people and cats she saw, and even inserts herself into some scenes. In Spring she focuses exclusively on cityscapes and broader landscapes. Those are the most common images in Autumn too, but not the only ones. Perhaps Pan's refinement of her technique has included a conscious decision to restrict her subject matter and focus on the larger scale. Or perhaps her goal of viewing the cherry blossoms on that trip made her want to give all her attention to the landscapes.

Black Sea

 

Black Sea

Dispatches and Recipes Through Darkness and Light

by Caroline Eden

photographs by Ola Smit and Theodore Kaye
Quadrille

2018

 

 

Black Sea is a book that seems to deliberately defy classification. First and foremost, it's travel writing, cataloging author Caroline Eden's trip around the Black Sea coast, starting in Odessa, Ukraine, passing through Romania and Bulgaria, then crossing Turkey, from Istanbul in the west to Trabzon in the east.

Admittedly, travel writing is always an eclectic genre, mixing narration of the author's voyage with tidbits of local history and current events, and it's often combined with food writing, as in this case, where Eden seemingly describes every meal as she travels the coast. But Eden's emphasis on food goes beyond a secondary focus - you could also think of this as food writing that happens to describe travel. She even includes recipes between each stop, usually 2-4 from each place she visits, adding up to dozens over the course of the book. So this is also kind of a cook book.

It's also also kind of a photo book. There aren't images on every page, and the book itself is novel-sized, not coffee table, but there are a lot of photos, usually getting a full page or two-page spread each. In a lot of travel books you get none, or else a few pages of color plates in the center. I don't usually talk about the physical qualities of the book I'm reading, but Black Sea is gorgeous. The hardcover has silver foil and an embossed surface making the wave pattern. The pages are edged in ink so that the closed book is a solid block of black. The paper is heavy, and the photography crisp and attractive.

And the thing is, this genre hybrid, this eclectic mix, it works. Eden marches on her stomach, and you follow along, eating your way from Odessa to Trabzon. There are local variations, but the recipes often involve garlic, rice pilaf or bulgar wheat, yogurt or cheese, honey, leafy greens, hazelnuts or chestnuts, and lots of fish, especially sardines and anchovies, which are beloved across the region. She buses between cities and has local guides and drivers in each one, eating at a mix of restaurants and hospitable family homes. Like me, she's curious about the famous 'mad honey' made from rhododendron pollen, said to be intoxicating in small doses, toxic in large, but she doesn't manage to try any.

Besides food, Eden's other big interest is immigrant communities. She writes about the Jewish and Italian communities in Odessa, Swiss farmers in Romania, Russians loyal to the tsar fleeing Lenin in Istanbul, and Turks who came back to Trabzon after generations in Russia. She's arguably more interested in these smaller communities, their culture and food, than she is with the majority population anywhere she goes. Eden gives special attention to writers, mostly but not only Russian authors exiled by the Soviets, so it would be easy to compile a reading list from books she mentions along the way.

Eden is not, for the most part, interested making any overt comments about politics. There's an obvious reason her journey doesn't start in Crimea or make it out of Turkey into Georgia or Russia - but she never mentions it. Ceausescu only comes up to explain why so few Anglophone travel writers have visited Romania. The Russian seizure of Crimea and territories in East Ukraine, the attempted Turkish coup and Erdogan's authoritarian crackdown afterward - Eden mentions them only in passing, and only when absolutely necessary.

I say this not to cast judgment, just as a description of what she wrote. There's a new edition of the book coming out this year with some supplemental writing about Putin's full invasion of Ukraine. It's hard for me to imagine this won't feel tacked on and dissonant with what's already there. Another writer, or perhaps even Eden herself, could write all about the historical and present-day conflicts and injustices in the countries surrounding the Black Sea, but I feel like that would belong to a different book, a different way of experiencing the region than what we get here.

One Hundred Aspects of the Moon

 
 

One Hundred Aspects of the Moon

art by Yoshitoshi

edited by Bas Verberk

Walther Konig

1885-1895, reprinted 2022

 

 

The two most famous Japanese woodcut artists, Hokusai and Hiroshige lived during the Edo period - roughly coinciding with the early modern period in Europe. They made prints depicting contemporary city life. In fact, the Japanese name for these images, ukiyo-e, isn't based on the medium, but the content. The -e suffix means 'pictures of' and ukiyo is 'the Floating World,' the name for the demimonde, the urban lifestyle of art, leisure, theater, and legal prostitution that arose in Tokyo and other cities at that time. So ukiyo-e are literally 'pictures of the Floating World,' but they're also all woodblock prints.

 

Yoshitoshi lived at the end of Edo and the start of the Meiji period - around the same time as the Industrial Revolution. He is apparently considered the third master of ukiyo-e after Hiroshige and Hokusai. Rather than representing the world he lived in though, Yoshitoshi's prints mostly depict Japanese history, legends, and folktales. One Hundred Views of the Moon is Yoshitoshi's most famous series of prints. The specific collection of that series I read was collected by the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, Germany, and edited by their curator of Japanese art, Bas Verberk. The quality of the photos the book is based on (and the quality of the book itself I guess) is high enough that you can actually see the wood grain of the printing block in many of the prints, whenever there's a wide enough expanse of a single color. Alongside each print is a page-length museum label where Verberk explains what the image depicts.

 

The Meiji period was a time when Japan was forcibly re-opened to commerce and diplomacy with Europe after something like 200 years of isolation. I don't know exactly what Yoshitoshi's intellectual or artistic agenda was, but I think it's fairly common in periods of great change and disruption for people to hearken back to stories from the past to try to reconstruct a new way forward. On a much smaller and less significant scale, I think you see the same thing in American superhero comics in the 2000s. Lots of independent creators have series that self-consciously recreate the style of the Silver Age comics of the 1960s, like Black Hammer and Astro City, as their creators try to figure out how to get from 'there' to 'here,' where here is hopefully a new way of writing superheroes that makes sense for the 21st century. Anyway, as I said, I don't know if that was Yoshitoshi's goal, and Verberk doesn't say either, but I imagine that the reason he picked such a wide array of old stories as his subject matter was that he was trying to figure out a new vision for Japanese culture, maybe even a new way to still be Japanese, while navigating a newly expanded world of European interference.

 

A lot of Yoshitoshi's prints, possibly even a majority in this collection, depict samurai and generals and other figures from the long Warring States period between the peace of the Heien and Edo, when there was no one central government, and the leaders of the regional governments competed for territory and control. As the title of the series suggests, the moon is present in nearly every image, and the few where you can't see it are understood to be taking place under the moonlight. Other pictures show scenes from the Buddhist tradition, characters from the Tale of Genji and especially the Tale of Heike, folktales and legends about people who traveled to the moon, animals with supernatural powers associated with the moon, and scenes from noh theater, which predates Edo-era kabuki. Yoshitoshi had several different name stamps for signing his work, and seems to have kind of used different stamped signatures for different themes within the series.

 

My favorite was 'Mount Yoshino Midnight Moon,' which shows a woman meeting a supernatural creature beneath either a new moon or lunar eclipse. I think if I seek out more ukiyo-e art, I might try to find someone who depicted the changes Japan was going through during the Meiji period. Or perhaps I might go backward myself, and actually look through a complete series of Hokusai or Hiroshige's prints, because I think I've only seen a few of their images, out of order and out of context. 

 

'Mount Yoshino Midnight Moon'
image source

 

Berlin Girls 1923 & Berlin Girls 1925

 
Berlin Girls 1923

Flirty Magazine Illustrations from the Weimar Republic

edited by Thomas Negovan

Century Guild

2019

 

 

Berlin Girls 1925

Flirty Magazine Illustrations from the Weimar Republic

edited by Thomas Negovan

Century Guild 

2022

 

 

I read Berlin Girls 1923 and Berlin Girls 1925 in such close succession that I'm going to treat them as a single entry. They are certainly not a single work spread across two volumes, but they are easier to talk about in direct comparison than they would be individually.

 

Both are art books put together from the Century Guild's excellent collection of 1920s and 30s German illustrations, and both consist almost entirely of images except for brief introductory essays by editor and museum curator Thomas Negovan. The images here come from a handful of Berlin magazines that I think were about bars, restaurants, theater, goings on, the night life, etc.

 

In 1923, Germany was experiencing hyper-inflation, money was essentially worthless, and the future seemed grim. The pictures from this era employ thicker line work, and have an almost pencil sketch quality. The colors are muted and spare and remind me of pastels. 

 

A lot of the images show women alone, often in their slips or other states of undress. There's something candid and un-self-conscious about these solo images, as though the artist actually caught someone getting ready to go out on the town for the night, or unwinding before bed afterward. When the girls are shown with men, half the time they're still in just a slip, while the men are inevitably decked out in tuxedos. I think those images are supposed to look sexy and fun, but there's an undercurrent to them that I find unsettling, like the men know they have the money and power, and the women can't quite hide their desperation.

 

By 1925, Germany's economy had improved. Hitler and his Brown Shirts had made a first attempt at a coup and been imprisoned for it. Prospects for the future seemed brighter. The changes in the visual style are dramatic. The lines are thin, often invisible. The images are in full color, and to me, it looks like watercolor. Instead of realistic proportions, a lot of the figures are boxier, more like statues than living people. They're also larger, or maybe zoomed in, filling the page instead of being surrounded by negative space. The two covers actually do a great job of showing the difference. As a matter of personal taste, I like the 1923 art style much better.

While many of the earlier illustrations showed 'behind the scenes' activities, most of what we see here takes place in public. There are more groups, fewer women alone. In general, the women are dressed nicer, in clothes that look new and maybe expensive. There's a recurring motif of a woman trying on clothes, and being outraged to notice that a man is spying on her. There are also a lot of beach scenes and women in bathing suits. 

 

Aside from the images of a man invading someone's privacy, these images are both less risque and less sinister than the ones from 1923, but on the down side, a lot of them are also more boring. The larger-than-life figures, the artificial poses, the fact that so many of the scenes are of people displaying themselves in public, all contribute to a sense that we're being shown how rich Berliners like to think of themselves, how they would like to be seen. In contrast, the more intimate and relaxed setting of most of the 1923 images appear to show more of what life was actually like for women in the night life.

Tokyo Jazz Joints

 
 

Tokyo Jazz Joints

by Philip Arneil and James Catchpole

Kehrer Verlang

2023

 

 

I think the best way to enjoy Tokyo Jazz Joints is probably while drinking a cold beer and listening to a jazz album. Coltrane seems to be quite popular at the venues in the book. This is a photo book, which documents Arneill and Catchpole's visits to hundreds of jazz bars and cafes in Tokyo and across Japan.
 
The book opens with essays by Arneill (who took the photos, and seems to have been the driving force behind the project) and Catchpole (an aficionado who acted as the tour guide.) Both speak fondly of the jazz joint as a place where the owners are serious fans who've amassed and catalogued enormous collections, and where the customers enjoy both the music and a space of freedom from the structures of work and home life.
 
The rest of the book is photos of the pair's favorite sites. I think each joint appears multiple times. Arneill seems to be aiming for a kaleidoscopic effect, showing us everything, but in fragments. We see interiors of the spaces, the bars, the record collections, the sound systems, the music menus, the memorabilia, the front entrances and back exits, the framed photos, the bathroom graffiti.
 
My favorite shots are from a far enough distance to take in several features at once. Initially I was disappointed by some of the close-ups, though that feeling lessened once I realized they weren't the only images of any bar, and disappeared entirely deeper into the book, once I understood their purpose. A lot of these places are absolute dives, and seeing a faded door sign or a markered-up bathroom wall communicates that. And those images are only part of the mix, not the whole thing.
 
The one change I'd make, if I had the power, would be to include a bit more prose from Arneill and Catchpole. Both seem to be competent narrators, and I would've enjoyed hearing a bit more about some of the places they visited.

Retronaut

 
Retronaut
The Photographic Time Machine
edited by Chris Wild

National Geographic

2014

 

 

Retronaut is a photo book of the blog-to-book variety, collecting Wild's favorite images from the first 4 years of retronaut dot com.

 
Wild's stated intention is to collect photos that in some way disrupt our image of the past. These include photos of prototype inventions that seem ahead of their time (like a two-disc crossfade phonograph), art that depicts predictions of the future, famous figure when they were young or doing something that clashes with how they are remembered today (like Martha Stewart as a fashion model), famous buildings and objects under construction, and a whole host of photos that create the appearance of anachronism or two different times meeting (like a woman in a cowgirl outfit tying her pony to a parking meter.)

 
It's a fun collection, and I often felt, as Wild hoped, an enjoyable frission between my mental image of some past time and the imagery in these photos.

How to Read Chinese Ceramics

 
 
How to Read Chinese Ceramics
edited by Denise Patry Leidy
Metropolitan Museum of Art
2015

 

 

The first book I finished this year is one I checked out from the library for my partner, but ended up reading myself before she got the chance.

 
How to Read Chinese Ceramics is a tour through the history of Chinese pottery, as well as a tour through the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. Author Denise Patty Leidy is one of the curators of the Met's Asian art collection, and reading it does feel a bit like touring a museum. 

 
The 41 primary objects get full-page full-color photos (plus close-ups on key details) and a couple pages of description. There's also almost always photos of one or two similar objects for comparison, or more rarely, a reproduction of a painting from the time, either depicting the potters at work, or someone using a similar finished object.

 
In my reading, the history of Chinese pottery can be divided into four main eras. The earliest Chinese pottery was porous and unglazed, with decorations painted on after firing, making it especially fragile. Its purpose was to be buried in tombs to accompany the deceased into the afterlife. You got a lot of figurines of dancers and musicians - the famous Terra Cotta Soldiers are a well-known example. The few dishes in this era are copies of the sort of metal dishes people actually used. This era goes from prehistoric times to maybe sometime around 600 AD and the Tang dynasty.

 
At that point, there is a switch, a pottery starts being made for use rather than just display, to be enjoyed by the living, rather than buried with the dead. For like the next 700 years, you get a flowering of diversity as kiln complexes all over China each start cultivating their own unique local style. In this period, you see influence from trade with Japan and with the Muslim world to the west. Among the few recurring motifs I saw were floral decorations, and use of the pale green glaze that Westerners call 'celadon.' (Apparently in China at the time, this was associated with the Yue-region kilns. Celadon as a name seems to come from a character in a French pastoral romance.)

 
Around 1300 AD, during the Yuan dynasty, you get a seismic change. Potters in the Jingdezhen region started making white porcelain ceramics with painted cobalt blue underglaze decorations and clear glaze. Leidy calls this one of the most important inventions in the history of ceramics. It's fair to say that people went a bit crazy for it. 

 
Very rapidly, the regional styles vanish, production is centralized in Jingdezhen, and 'china' as the name for porcelain dishes is born. All over the world, local potters start copying the style as best they can, usually using white slip over darker clay, but for like 400 years, no one else can figure out how to make porcelain, and real china from China is one of the most prestigious and expensive exports that money can buy. (The Yuan dynasty ends fairly early in this period, and is succeeded by the Ming dynasty, whose name in the West is also more-or-less synonymous with blue and white ceramics.)

 
Around 1700, a few things happen. The transition from the Ming dynasty to the Qing dynasty was apparently rather rocky, and caused slow-downs of pottery production and export. Potters in Japan and Germany independently figure out how to make real porcelain instead of an obviously inferior facsimile. And the Dutch push out the Portugese as China's primary European trading partner, and are considerably more ruthless in their dealings. 

 
So in this fourth era, China is no longer the single dominant world source of china, and maybe no longer the most prestigious. Japanese potters copied the Chinese style but used full color instead of only blue; at this time Chinese potters start experimenting with other colored glazes and enamels to copy the Japanese! (The Dutch still want blue and white ware with traditional, perhaps stereotypical, decorations.) You get a reemergence of some of the local diversity that vanished overnight when porcelain was discovered.
 

The newest piece in the Met's collection that Leidy shares was made during the Chinese Republic that followed the Qing dynasty and was overthrown by Mao's revolution. The fate of Chinese pottery in the Communist era is a question for another book.

The Burning House

 
The Burning House
What Would You Take?
edited by Foster Huntington
It Books
2012

 

 

The Burning House is a blog turned into a book. The premise of the blog was that people would submit a photo and an explainer list of the things they'd want to take if their house were on fire. Huntington, the blog's creator, would curate and post these entries, and the book is a further distillation.

 
Most of the results are surprisingly similar, though the clever staging of the photos lends the project even more visual interest than you might expect. When thinking of their most treasured possessions, most people seem to think of a mix of the prosaic (wallet, keys, passport); the sentimental (photos, journals, letters, childhood toys); the financially valuable (phones, laptops, cameras); and the kinds of things that serve as symbols for one's self-image (favorite clothes, books, movies, music). The variations within those constraints are fascinating.

 
A few people took the prompt more literally than most. They emphasized survival gear, or limited themselves to just one or two items. Their accompanying essays often sounded scolding, but arguably it was them, not all the others, who'd missed the true point of the task. A few people actually had survived house fires and submitted photos of what they'd actually saved.

 
Beyond merely the similar ways people respond to the same prompt, the entries had other things in common. Almost everyone had a film camera to save, and most had several. Nearly all the phones and laptops were from Apple; most of the journals were Moleskine. People with pets, or occasionally children, mentioned saving those too, and usually included them in the photo.

 
The overall effect is like touring a museum. Each page is an exhibit of the most important things in someone's life, arranged to try to tell a kind of story of their life, their loves, their values ... as well as their coolness, their status, etc.

Soviet Asia

 
 

Soviet Asia
Soviet Modernist Architecture in Central Asia

edited by Robert Conte and Stefano Perago

Fuel

2019

 

 

Soviet Asia is a photo book showing images of the government buildings the Soviets erected in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan in the 1960s-1980s, along with an introductory essay and a concluding one.

 
I spotted this book in the library and it caught my eye. I've had it checked out for a little while, but it was probably recent events that inspired me to read it right now.

 
Conte and Perego talk about how the Soviet government in Moscow tried to impose a unified culture on all the Soviet states, and how this was especially disruptive in Central Asia, where many people still led nomadic lifestyles until those were forbidden by the state, and where multi-story apartment blocks didn't accommodate the preferences of people used to dwelling in multi-generational homes alongside parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, etc.

 
The actual buildings remind me of other big concrete structures that went up in the US around the same time. There are apartment buildings in my hometown and Columbus that look similar to the ones in the book, and plenty of campus buildings at the schools where I went to college, and grad school, and where I work now look like they're part of the same architectural movement.

The Art of Cuphead

 
The Art of Cuphead

by Studio MDHR

Dark Horse Comics

2020
 

 

The Art of Cuphead is an art book showcasing pencil drafts and final art designs for the characters and backgrounds of the video game Cuphead. The accompanying text is excellent about pointing out allusions to the classic cartoons and 8-bit video games that are referenced in Cuphead's visuals and design.