The Little Red Hen

Based upon a who-knows-how-old traditional folk tale (probably Russian), The Little Red Hen tells the story of an industrious hen, who earns precisely what she deserves. This title was one of the first dozen published by the famous Little Golden Book series for children in 1942. 

The timeless, animated illustrations were created by J.P. Miller, who contributed to the animation of Disney classics "Dumbo," "Fantasia" and "Pinocchio."

The fable relates a time-honored attitude which moralizes and elevates the meaning of hard work.

Here is my most favorite illustration, depicting in many (mostly odd) ways, what I aspire to be one day(!):

The Work of the Shokunin

"Once you decide on your occupation you must immerse yourself in your work. You have to fall in love with your work. Never complain about your job. You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill. That's the secret of success and is the key to being regarded honorably."

So says Jiro Ono, the star and subject of the 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which follows the man called the world's greatest sushi chef. The film is an ode to a concept in Japanese culture called the shokunin. According to renowned Japanese woodworker Toshio Odate:

“The Japanese word shokunin is defined by both Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries as ‘craftsman’ or ‘artisan,’ but such a literal description does not fully express the deeper meaning. The Japanese apprentice is taught that shokunin means not only having technical skills, but also implies an attitude and social consciousness. … The shokunin has a social obligation to work his/her best for the general welfare of the people.  This obligation is both spiritual and material, in that no matter what it is, the shokunin’s responsibility is to fulfill the requirement.”

Echoing this ideal, in the film Yoshikazu, Jiro's oldest son, relays basic tenet's of his father's philosophy in his work:

"Always look ahead and above yourself. Always try to improve on yourself. Always strive to elevate your craft."

In this scene, Jiro himself describes his discipline of work in words as poetic as the cinematography itself. Be sure to see the film for a fuller and even more inspiring experience:

The Leatherman

Childhood in New York's Hudson Valley whets a certain acquired appetite for things Gothic in America's colonial history. Some of the nation's oldest cemeteries were field trip destinations, with their time-worn gravestones and broken crypts, and small footsteps travel the same teetering cobblestones where once wandered George Washington, as well as the Headless Horseman. In the autumn especially, when weather and fall foliage turn upon themselves,  it becomes symmetrically difficult to tease myth and history apart from one other. 

Leatherman, June 9, 1885

A local legend told of a romantic, phantom figure known as the Leatherman. Little was known for certain about this man, except that he was a vagabond who walked a scrupulously timed 365-mile circuit, reappearing at routine locations every 34 to 36 days. He wore almost entirely leather clothing, lending him his moniker. His story furnishes him with a French, or possibly French-Canadian, descent, owing to the sparse conversations he carried with those who kept food waiting for him along his way, and the prayerbook found with him upon his death. He slept in known caves in the area, surviving harsh weather and blizzards in such simple shelters.

Inside the Leatherman Cave in Watertown, Connecticut

Time has revealed little, or nothing, about his true identity. His death in 1889, and his burial in the Sparta Cemetery in Ossining, New York, sealed many secrets. Who was he? Where did he come from? What compelled him to travel in the mysterious way he did? Why did a silent wanderer become such a captivating character to those whom he lived among?

His gravesite was decided in 2011 to have been made too close to busy Route 9. When the grave was to be relocated, coffin nails and soil recovered from the original burial site were the only remains to be found. Today, a marker hosts a plaque that simply reads, "The Leatherman."

Some secrets must be left to wander.

Design in Code

Surely throughout the history of the written word, there has been as much a need to keep information concealed as to disperse it. Hence, the world of code.

I have lovingly mentioned previously the work of graphic designer Marian Bantjes, whose wheelhouse hosts a genius for luxury and adornment. In her first published book, aptly entitled I Wonder, one of her visual essays, called "Secrets," is a code in which a letter is written to one of her friends.

I have not personally tried to decode it, though some of the symbols resemble letterforms more closely than others. Looking at it becomes a study in "unlearning" how to read, an experiment in seeing the forest for the trees, and admiring the artwork for its loveliness alone.

Bantjes translated this code onto fabric, to lovely effect. Of it she says: "I liked the idea of people unknowingly sitting on a secret communication."

Interestingly, the word cipher is defined as a secret message, as well as the key to decoding an encrypted message. In addition, it can mean "a person or thing of no importance," which I think speaks highly to our nature as humans: we find no meaning in things we cannot or do not understand... As always, I too wonder...

Tangentially, please enjoy my most recently discovered work by Bantjes. (I am very un-secretly obsessed with it.) What do you suppose this kaleidoscopic kitten wrapping paper means?

Hide-and-Seek: The Secret Stories of WW II's Stolen Art

On February 28, 2012, German police discovered a collection of over 1,000 old and new master artworks in an apartment in Munich. The reclusive inhabitant, Cornelius Gurlitt, watched as all the pieces, among which were works by Picasso, Dürer, Renoir, Chagall and Matisse, were packed and seized.

A previously unknown work by Marc Chagall, found in Cornelius Gurlitt's Munich apartment.

Raubkunst is the name given to the universe of art looted and hidden by the Nazis during World War II. In total, the collection is estimated to have included about 650,000 pieces. The story of this artwork, and its retrieval, is portrayed in this year's Monuments Men film, loosely based on the activities of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, tasked to safeguard cultural artifact during and following the war. American and Allied forces discovered secret caches of billions of dollars' worth of the Western world's most important art throughout Germany, Austria, and Italy. Much of it was secreted into salt mines and castles, to be stored until Hitler's intended Führermuseum could be constructed in his hometown of Linz, Austria. Of course, the museum was never to be built.

A U.S. soldier, in April 1945, with recovered art stolen by the Nazis and stored in a church in Ellingen, Germany. From Reuters/Landov.

Some of the art was never retrieved, and continues to lead a secret history tucked into small corners of the world, such as the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt. Much of what was kept there would likely have been considered "degenerate art" under the Reich, which destroyed many masterpieces Hitler deemed as contributory to "cultural disintegration." Gurlitt's father, Hildebrand, though part-Jewish, was an art dealer for the Nazis. Whether he had hoarded the many artworks, or saved them from destruction, his son Cornelius had lived with the secret of their keeping almost all of his life:

"The pictures were his whole life. And now they were gone. The grief he had been going through for the last year and a half, alone in his empty apartment, the bereavement, was unimaginable. The loss of his pictures [...] hit him harder than the loss of his parents, or his sister, who died of cancer in 2012. [...] He insisted his father had only associated with Nazis in order to save these precious works of art, and Cornelius felt it was his duty to protect them, just as his father had heroically done. Gradually the artworks became his entire world, a parallel universe full of horror, passion, beauty, and endless fascination, in which he was a spectator."  —from Vanity Fair

The Ghent Altarpiece recovered from the Altaussee salt mine at the end of World War II.

In Monuments Men, George Clooney plays the role of Frank Stokes, an officer of the MFAA. He says that, "You can wipe out an entire generation, you can burn their homes to the ground and somehow they'll still find their way back. But if you destroy their history, you destroy their achievements and it's as if they never existed."

The stories of war—and of art—are told in terms of fear, obsession, rapture, and madness, sowed in a fertile bed of secrets. Secrets, great and small, each have a lifetime. Some are kept, some remain stolen, and some make history.

Cornelius Gurlitt passed away in May of 2014. The provenance and future of the works with which he lived are still undecided or unknown.

The exhibition "Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937" at the Neue Galerie in New York City will be on display until September 1, 2014.

Additionally, the National Gallery of Art presents "In the Library: Preservation and Loss during World War II," on exhibit until September 26, 2014.

Roald Dahl's Secret Writing World

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.” ― Roald Dahl

Author Roald Dahl is the creator of many worlds. His most beloved fantasies were said to have been engineered in a "secret writing hut" in his garden at Buckinghamshire, England. Dahl related his writing process to his biographer, saying:

“It’s really quite easy,” he would say. “I go down to my little hut, where it’s tight and dark and warm, and within minutes I can go back to being six or seven or eight again.”

The famed hut is now rebuilt as a gallery at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre.

"There's No Place Like Here"

Where better to conceal a secret than the metropolis? Somewhere on New York City's Upper East Side sits a hidden bookshop. Proprietor Michael Seidenberg allowed Etsy photographer Andrew David Watson entrance to Brazenhead Books. Here, a charming homage to the life of the secondhand bookshop, as well as to living life on one's own terms:

Art on Time

When considering the role of attention in the world of art criticism, the name Jerry Saltz always and assuredly comes to mind. His columns tend toward the impassioned and his Facebook page is a forum of uninterrupted dialogue about the nature of art, and, as social media would have it, the nature of opinion as well.

Barring all things before or since, my admiration for the New York critic was captured on February 28, 2011, with Saltz's singular response to a reader, who had begun to consider the time we spend looking at and experiencing art. He wrote that he had once spent 36 hours viewing Giotto's work in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua:

"When I was in my early thirties, I spent three-straight twelve-hour days in this walk-in ecstasy machine — not eating, not moving, just looking. In that tremendous fresco cycle, I saw the birth of Western Painting, and the death of any doubt I had that maybe art wasn’t enough."

image via This Is Italy

In equally electrifying contrast:

"The shortest viewing that changed my life happened three summers ago. My wife and I visited the Niaux caves in southern France. We and a group of fifteen paying tourists were led 30 minutes’ walk into the cave. It was cold and dark, our paths lit with only flashlights. Finally, the guide stopped and asked for our lights. She then shined her own flashlight on a wall of prehistoric paintings of bison and antelope. The psychic-visual magnitude was so powerful that I thought I was going to die. I’ve never seen anything this staggering before or since. No one ever painted mammals this spectacularly again. We were allowed only five minutes. They still reverberate within me."

image via The Wall Street Journal: 'Before History, Niaux's Art

What is it about particular creations that arrest our undiluted consideration? Where lies the root of fascination that draws our complete attention from the recesses of our distracted minds and ignites our child-like wonder? Are humans willful attendees to such things? Or do our imaginations simply have no choice?

Lamentation by Giotto di Bondone in the Scrovegni Chapel

Empathy & Attention in the Age of Smartphones

No discourse has been spared on the topic of technology and its exponential effect on how we spend our time and skill. To add to the debate, last year comedian Louis C.K. weighed in on how he thinks smartphones affect our livelihoods and that of our children:

"I think these things are toxic, especially for kids... They don't look at people when they talk to them, and they don't build empathy."

What began as light-hearted late-night repartee evolved into a sweeping existential statement about our basic humanity, and how we attend to our lives:

"The thing is, you need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there, like this. That's being a person, right?

[...]

I look around, pretty much 100% of people driving are texting, and everybody's murdering each other with their cars. People are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own 'cause they don't want to be alone for a second."

Experience this raw, and hilarious, testimony to emotional attention here:

Attention as Intention

"Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be."

W.H. Auden

The Arnolfini Portrait

This historic painting by Flemish artist Jan van Eyck was considered hugely innovative for its time. The artist even rendered his own early form of graffiti in the work itself: "Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434" (Jan van Eyck was here. 1434). 

The precision and aspect of this piece has never failed to capture my attention. The viewer is presented with a seemingly small interior, in which somehow resides an entire constellation of meaning. We are presented with an eye-spy game of the most symbolic kind, welcomed to catch as many deftly hidden details as we can, from the sliver of vegetation just beyond the open window, to the wood grain on the furniture. We are even invited into the space behind us, via the convex mirror facing us, and the painter himself, at the far end of the room. The artist, the subjects, and ourselves are all very much in attendance.

Art historian Ernst Gombrich noted of this painting that,

"For the first time in history the artist became the perfect eye-witness in the truest sense of the term."

Van Eyck endowed this portrait with his full attention, and regained it not only within the pages of history, but in the moments modern viewers bear witness to it time and again.