“A Landscape Painted with Tea” (Tags 4x27), Inv. #1415 (photographed in seven sections). The title is borrowed from Milorad Pavic's novel. Box dimensions 44,5 x 164,1 cm., depth 4,5 cm.. Total of 108 tags. Near the end of this section of the site is a short video of the work, with sound.
These notes appear also in the captions of the parts of the three se ctions of the work, or subsets of 36 tags each. It's probably handier for the viewer to consult these captions while viewing the details. Still, the complete list is provided here.
Rows A-D from top to bottom, columns 1-27 from left to right.
Row A
A1. Head of Cleopatra, drawing, Michelangelo Buonarroti, ca.1533-34.
A2. Frederick Douglass attacked by thugs at American Anti-Slavery Society meeting, Pendleton, Indiana, 1843, engraving.
A3. The Comet of 1007, from The Book of Miracles, a mid-16th century book of wonders.
A4. “Stormtroops Advancing Under Gas”, etching and aquatint by Otto Dix, 1924. Grenade-wielding soldier from the First World War. I saw this about 2015 at the MART of Rovereto in Trentino, Italy, which presented an exhibition commemorating the centennial of the Great War.
A5. The Hill Cumorah, painting by Carl Christian Anton Christensen, 1800s. The angel Moroni appearing to Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church. (Joseph Smith appears in D21.)
A6. The Flaying of Saint Bartholomew, an apostle of the first century AD who established the early church in Armenia. Illustrations of Bartholomew have had their part in the history of medical and anatomical illustration. Legend has it that he was skinned for having converted a local king against the wishes of some others.
A7. US Army Private Lynndee England abusing a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, 2003, dishonoring herself, her service, her flag, and her country. Drawing by R. Crumb from a photo in Time magazine, 2005. I wonder if she has come to feel ashamed of what she did, or if she is simply and incorrigibly morally deficient.
A8. A young girl getting raped by a Turkish soldier during a war in the Balkans, in an engraving by Austrian artist Gottfried Sieben. The remarkable thing about this series of engravings, called Balkangreuel, or Balkan Horror, other than the vicious stereotypes of the Turks, is that Sieben managed to combine horror with pornographic appeal, a pretty sick combination. Another picture from this series is found at M1 of the eight-tag photographs.
A9. The Marquis de Sade, in an allegorical portrait by H. Biberstein, 1912.
A10. A German woodcut by Albrecht Dürer, publ. 1499, an illustration for Das Narrenschiff, or The Ship of Fools, or Stultifera navis, by Sebastian Brant, a satiric poet. The wheel has to do with happiness or luck. Of the three figures, one is an ass from the middle down, another an ass from the middle up, and the other is a complete ass.
A11. The Death of Captain Cook, 15 Feb. 1779, Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, engraving by John Rickman.
A12. Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) offering eternal fire to Gushtasb from the Shāhnameh, or Book of Kings, by Persian poet Firdawsi (ca. 940-1026 AD). Illustration (artist not known) 13thC, Tehran. Zoroaster in a state of divine illumination.
A13. Le midi, part of the series Les heures du jour, etching-engravings by Emmanuel Jean Nepomucène de Ghendt after originals by Pierre-Antoine Baudouin, ca. 1778. A young French noblewoman taking her pleasure on a hot summer day. Risqué in its time, very subtle for ours - it’s understood that she has been masturbating.
A14. The Triumph of Christ, ca. 1965, by visionary artist Ernst Fuchs.
A15. An old English etching of a girl playing horsey on a fence.
A16. Indian drawing of a warrior, perhaps Banasura, who had 1000 arms.
A17. The Tree of Life, a diagram of the classes of animals, 1879, by Ernst Haeckel, the great naturalist, artist, and contemporary of Darwin.
A18. French engraving of the Sun God - or some esoteric notion, ca. 1600-1700.
A19. Timothy Leary’s hand print.
A20. A defeated warrior being scalped.
A21. The Buffalo Bisons, a major league baseball team from Buffalo, New York, 1887. There were a few teams in that era, in different leagues, that all called themselves the Buffalo Bisons. (One was an “outlaw” franchise of the People’s League, started as a players’ initiative - which sounds like a sort of labor dispute with the league many players were playing in, in which I detect a possible syndicalist or socialist influence - which lasted only one year, 1890. Notable members of the team included “Dummy” Hoy, a deaf mute player, the more famous Connie Mack, and the curiously named Lady Baldwin, apparently a man.)
The remarkable thing about the team represented here, for me, ignorant of the history as I am, is that one of the players is black. He is Frank Grant, second baseman of the Buffalo Bisons of the International League, who had a truly illustrious career in baseball, both as a player and later as an organizer of the Negro Leagues, after the color line was enforced in pro baseball. Grant received his Baseball Hall of Fame plaque in 2006, although unfortunately not in person. Grant, and the history of race in baseball, are very fascinating subjects. I discovered that Plessy, of the Plessy vs. Ferguson Decision of 1896 of the Supreme Court, which infamously affirmed the legality of “separate but equal” accommodations for black and white, was a professional baseball player. Plessy had refused to accommodate himself in the colored section of a train. (My father was stationed in Texas as an airman during WWII, and once while traveling by train with my mother in the South, found no room in the white car. So he and my mother went to sit in the colored car. The white conductor gave them a hard time about it, but my father was stubborn. A white man, he was not arrested, unlike Plessy 50 years before. Perhaps the situation was so unexpected that nobody had ever bothered to make a law against it.)
One of Grant’s teammates, Curry Foley (cropped out of the picture on my tag), was in 1882 the first major league player to hit for the cycle (a term I never heard before), that is, to hit a single, a double, a triple, and a home run in the same game, a rare accomplishment.
One of the pleasures of this work with old pictures of every sort is the detours I take and all I learn, gratuitously, from the research. At some point after identifying Frank Grant, I realized that I have in my archive another image (a pen-and-ink drawing) of a black baseball player with the uniform of the Cuban Giants - it was Grant. (It was said that the Cuban Giants pretended to be Cubans, and so on the field spoke to each other in some invented lingo they hoped would sound like Spanish.) This particular detour, regarding Grant, is just an indication of the excursions you can take, starting from almost any of the tags in these works.
A22. Slave revolt in Saint Domingue, now Haiti, 1791.
A23. Electrocution of Ruth Snyder, 1928, Sing Sing. The first known photograph of an electrocution, this one was made by a clever photographer who strapped a camera to his ankle.
A24. Jonah and the Whale, engraving, 1600s?.
A25. Mole, from The Wind in the Willows.
A26. The Flaying of Marsyas by Apollo, 1580-1600, engraving by Theodorus Galle after Stradanus. What you get for the sin of hubris, when you disobey the gods.
A27. Doomed prisoner of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police.
Row B
B1. A medieval scholar working on a chart, perhaps astrological.
B2. Death operating a water pump, illustrating the ease with which infectious diseases spread. (Another part of the same illustration is found at L1, an eight-piece selection of tags.)
B3. El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid, or The Third of May, 1808, by Francisco Goya, 1814. Men being executed by firing squad.
B4. Leo Frank, unjustly convicted of murder, and lynched by an antisemitic mob in Georgia, 1915.
B5. A drawing of diatoms, by Ernst Haeckel, naturalist and artist.
B6. Diagram of the system of veins of the forearm. Broadly, 1500-1700.
B7. “The Great Masturbator, And the Country He Rode in On”, photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin, 2017. Witkin engaged a Trump look-alike for this photograph. Ordinarily Witkin doesn’t create political photographs, but for this and a recreation of Thèodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, featuring George W. Bush and several associates, he outdid himself.
B8. A satirical illustration by John Leech, 1848, showing the hypocrisy of the existence of slavery in the supposedly democratic USA.
B9. Y no hai remedio (And There’s Nothing to Be Done) - Plate 15 of Los Desastres de la Guerra, or The Disasters of War, by Francesco Goya, ca.1810–23. A man being executed by firing squad.
B10. Shrunken Men, about two feet tall, on display at the Museum of the American Indian. I lived for years in Washington Heights, NYC, a short walk form the museum (whose collections have since been moved downtown), so I got to know these guys well. It always amused me that, while the figure on the right looks typically “Indian” - indigenous person of the Amazon jungle - the one on the left has sandy blond hair, mustache and beard; I took him for a Norwegian anthropologist who ran into some bad luck. I think of them both as “Slim Jim”, named for the beef jerky snack.
B11. A Korean (Chinese?) prisoner, member of the Independence Forces, about to be beheaded by a Japanese soldier using a sword. The other part at B4 of the 4x12 piece. ca. 1938. Parentheses, because a Korean blog shows the same photo in the context of the Japanese occupation of Korea, while a Vietnamese blog presents this photo as from the Japanese occupation of China, also giving the year 1938.
B12. Singer-songwriter Tom Rapp in the Netherlands, of the band Pearls Before Swine. One of my musical heroes of that era.
B13. A drawing by Ernst Haeckel, naturalist and artist, showing some of the higher primates. The various apes are getting an eyeful of this shapely woman, represented almost like Eve in the Garden of Eden. Two are definitely grinning, while the gorilla at lower right seems to be saying “Hubba-Hubba!” or something Fred Flintstonish like that. Without evidence, I suspect the woman to resemble Haeckel’s much-loved wife, who died when both were young.
B14. Ludwig Van Beethoven, by visionary artist Alex Grey, in a moment of divine inspiration, his third eye wide open. The fire of creation.
B15. Another drawing by Ernst Haeckel, 1870, a diagram of the profiles of various simians, supposedly to show their resemblance to human types. From his Natural Creation History. The part unseen here shows twelve human profiles, which are tendentiously racist. I’d say that all of them look pretty stupid, except the one that happens to resemble Haeckel himself. By comparison, all the apes seem more intelligent. As an artist, Haeckel was a great observer of simpler creatures, but when it came to humans, his prejudices informed his drawing.
B16. Cast made from the masque mortuaire or death mask of “L'inconnue de la Seine”, or the beautiful unknown girl of the Seine, who in the late 1880s was found drowned in the river with a very placid, happy expression. The morgue pathologist, taken by her beauty and her expression, made a death mask. In the next years, copies were made and became a popular morbid fixture among the Bohemians of Paris. Or so the story goes - some say the mask was made from a living girl.
B17. A crucifixion, in an etching by Rembrandt van Rijn.
B18. Police photograph of the crime scene at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington heights, NYC, after the assassination of Malcolm X. This was Malcolm’s seat; in the background a few bullet holes are highlighted by the forensic team.
B19. An early view of lower Manhattan when it was New Amsterdam: a fort and settlement in the background, a canoe of Mannahatus natives passing in the foreground.
B20. Tattooed Lady. I wonder if she was the inspiration for the wonderful song, performed by Groucho Marx in one of his movies, “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”.
B21. Drawing of Marie Antoinette awaiting her execution by guillotine.
B22. Pendaison de Bachi-Bouzouks, or Hanging of Bachi-Bouzouks,1st Balkan War, Ketcheukeli, Bulgaria, Dec. 1912. The Bachi-Bouzouks were mercenary soldiers of the Ottoman army, despised for their pillaging. In the background I can make out what appears to be a church tower at right, and a very tall minaret at left. Published in the French newspaper Le Petit Journal.
B23. “Ned Ludd, the Leader of the Luddites”, the movement of weavers who rebelled against the introduction of industrial looms, which put the weavers in penury. Behind him a factory burns. The legendary Ludd wears a woman’s dress, and is missing a shoe. The illustration of 1812 says at the bottom “drawn from life by an officer”.
B24. A man fishing from the riverside, in someplace like Cambridge, wood engraving by Thomas Bewick, ca. (very broadly) 1800. Bewick made many fine illustrations of animals, bucolic scenes, and other subjects.
B25. An enslaved man (or formerly enslaved) displaying the scars on his back from severe whipping.
B26. “Grand Knout”, engraving. A man being punished with the knout, basically a heavy knot at the end of a rope or chain, that was used to beat prisoners. Russia.
B27. The Burning of Master John Rogers from Fox's Book of Martyrs. Man being burned at the stake. John Rogers, a Protestant vicar, had a part in the translation into vernacular English of the Bible along with William Tyndale.
Row C
C1. Mesmerist and patient, ca.1795.
C2. Gulliver bidding farewell to the Houyhnhnms, from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726).
C3. A French nobleman (with a tremendous hat or wig) taking tea with an equally fashionable lady, out of view here. The picture on the wall shows two demons drinking as well.
C4. Christians being hung and disemboweled.
C5. Meeting between indigenous people and whites - New England or Virginia?
C6. Man flagellating himself in penance, from an engraving by Albrecht Dürer.
C7. A bris, or ritual Jewish circumcision. As small as the illustration is, the baby seems to be just reacting to the pain of the cut.
C8. One of the series “The Seven Deadly Sins”, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1556-58. In the foreground we can read “superbia”, i.e. vanity or pride.
C9. Two men visiting a Wunderkammer, or chamber of wonders, filled with many marvelous artifacts of animal life. Fish, crab, starfish, a tusk…the other wall is seen in N2. From Ferrante Imperato, Room of Curiosities, engraving 1599, Naples, Italy. Imperato was a pharmacist and naturalist who set up his own chamber of curiosities.
C10. Execution by hanging and then dismemberment. At the center there is a man with a big ax about to strike another blow against a man whose whole chest has already been opened up.
C11. The execution by beheading of Anne Boleyn, 1526.
C12. Figure of Plutus or Pluto, an old man encountered in the underworld, who chews on his own fingers, in an engraving by Gustave Doré, 1866, for Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. The scene illustrates Dante’s Canto VII, vv8-9, "Curst wolf! thy fury inward on thyself Prey, and consume thee!"
C13. Eye Reflecting the Theatre of Besançon, drawing of ca.1800 by visionary architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, showing a great stadium or meeting hall within an eye.
C14. Emily Dickinson, poet, from a drawing made after a photographic portrait. She also appears in C7 of “Homage”, the 4x12 piece, and U5 of the eight-tag pieces.
C15. Engraving based on The Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563. It’s not clear to me whether this engraving is also by Breugel, or by another artist, but this is very similar to the drawing by Anton Joseph von Prenner.
C16. Portrait of Ubu (Alfred Jarry’s creation for his plays Père Ubu and Ubu Roi), photograph by Dora Maar, 1936. Ubu looks part mole, part dolphin fetus.
C17. Cain slaying Abel, in an old woodcut.
C18. “The Bewitched Stableman”, by Hans Baldung Grien. I can’t figure this out - the stableman lies unconscious on the floor, the horse looks very angry with him, and a woman at upper left (cropped out here) brandishes a branch of sorghum at the stableman. She is presumably a witch who has cast a spell on the man. (The branch of sorghum has to do with the belief that witches flew on brooms, or stalks of sorghum.) I have it on good authority that the tools dropped on the floor are ordinary tools for grooming, and have nothing to do with castration as I, a non-horseman, had suspected, feeling instinctive and total solidarity with the horse.
C19. Man being executed by boiling, from an illustration.
C20. The Execution of William Francis Kemmler, Aug. 6, 1890. Kemmler was the first person to die in the electric chair. Drawing, 1890.
C21. Impalement execution by Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia (aka Dracula), Romania. 15th-century woodcut of people being impaled on pikes, and then chopped to pieces. Vlad himself is supervising, though cropped out of view here. He was also known as Vlad the Impaler.
C22. A painting in a picture gallery, a battle scene which is literally exploding out of the canvas, by Grandville, or Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard, from Le Louvre des marionnettes.
C23. Hanging at the Old Bailey, ca.1750. Several persons about to be garrotted; English.
C24. Execution of a European by an indigenous American, using a scythe-like sort of ax.
C25. Ignatz Mouse tranquilly sleeping his nth confinement at the Coconino County Jail; drawing for Krazy Kat by the immortal George Herriman, 1938.
C26. A giraffe.
C27. Witches, by Hans Baldung Grien, ca. 1514. Another part of this drawing - brush-and-ink with white highlighting - is seen in V5 of the eight-tag pieces.
Row D
D1. Enslaved man attempting to escape his pursuers.
D2. Sleeping woman in chains.
D3. Anna Pavlova as Aspicia in Marius Petipa's The Pharaoh’s Daughter, 1906. The famed Russian ballerina, shooting with a bow and arrow.
D4. The Old Man, by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1523-25. Death kindly escorting an old man - straight into the grave.
D5. Men shoveling barley in a malthouse. British, 1800s.
D6. Man at his writing table - perhaps Montesquieu, or Voltaire. I don’t find again this engraving again, and the fashions of those days are too unfamiliar to me to judge a year. European men were wearing wigs for 200 years!
P.S. - Scratch all that! Amazing how far off I can be when I resort to guessing! I happened to find the engraving again, the full scene, and it's "The Distressed Poet", by William Hogarth, 1737.
D7. The Martyrdom of St. Alban, by Matthew Paris, ca. 1250-60. I couldn’t make sense of this old illumination, in which the eyes are falling out of the executioner’s head, so I did some research that of course I must share. According to legend (of ca. 200-300 AD), Alban was a wealthy pagan of Verulamium, the ancient town of Roman Britain (near present-day St. Albans), who hosted a wandering Christian priest, Amphibalus, and was then converted. The local authorities were enraged, and determined to arrest and execute Amphibalus. Alban saved the priest by exchanging clothes and allowing him to escape, but was then beheaded in Amphibalus’ stead. His hair was tied to a tree branch, and at the moment the sword came down on Alban’s head, the executioners eyes fell out. This sight provoked many more conversions (and another round of martyrs’ deaths). For his part, Matthew Paris was an English Benedictine monk, a miniaturist, and a cartographer.
D8. Obelisk in a garden, with skulls and bones decorating the nearby columns.
D9. Captain John Smith taken captive by Powhatans, color engraving from the Generall Historie of Virginia, by Captain Smith, 1624. The capture of Smith by the Powhatans, who dance their victory. In the drawing is written “Their Triumph about him. C. Smith bound to a tree to be shott to death 1607”.
D10. Messaline dans la loge de Lisisca. Messalina was the wife of the notorious Roman Emperor Claudius, and she had a reputation for promiscuity. It was said (by Juvenal to Messalina’s son Britannicus) that at night she would slip away from her sleeping husband and go to work in a squalid brothel, using her nom d’art Lisisca, where she would take all comers, and be paid as well. So, this scene here, by Agostino Carracci, is not a rape as it might appear. Messalina seems to have had an obsession with being penetrated - nowadays perhaps she would be considered a sex addict - and could not be satisfied no matter how many men she gave herself to - rather pitiful. Consequently she has been a favorite subject for artists. This is one of Carracci’s series of erotic engravings, published in 1728.
D11. Torture sketch by Liu Renwang. Liu was wrongfully convicted of a 2008 murder and subjected to torture. Later he made crude drawings to show what had been done to him. His conviction was eventually overturned by a Chinese court.
D12. Profile of cargo ship, with kidnapped Africans in the hold.
D13. Late-Victorian woodcut of a woman holding the bridle of a unicorn.
D14. Old English woodcut of Adam and Eve and the Serpent.
D15. Sergeant Henry Johnson, American soldier of the First World War, who was honored (promptly) by the French with the Croix de Guerre for his valor in combat in the Argonne Forest in May 1918. (His unit had been assigned to a French command, because US General Pershing did not think that blacks were good soldiers, or any good at all. Moreover, there was much racist resentment among white US soldiers who did not want to fight alongside blacks, or share the trenches with them. Apparently the French had no such problem.)
With another sentry, Johnson (at that time a Private) beat off a large German raiding party, killing four and wounding several others, but suffering many serious wounds in the fight. (And he was just a little guy, 5-foot-4, 130 pounds.) His status as a war hero did little or nothing to improve his lot in life after the war. He was much honored for a brief period after the war, and gave speeches around the country. Once he appeared in St. Louis, and was expected to give a conventional, uplifting speech about his fight, but instead spoke about the mistreatment blacks were subjected to in the US Army. Not long after, a warrant was issued for his arrest for wearing his uniform beyond the date of his commission! Don’t get above yourself! Don’t you have any clothes of your own?
He was discharged from the army with severe disabilities, but was never granted a disability pension. He went back to his old job as a redcap at the Albany train station. But he had difficulties owing mostly to his physical condition - he had never recovered from his wounds. His wife left him, taking their children. He became tubercular, and for this reason only (nothing to do with his combat wounds) was finally given a total disability rating by the Veterans Bureau, with monthly compensation, in 1927. He died in penury in 1929, aged 36, and was buried at Arlington. He was only awarded posthumously with the Purple Heart in 1996, the Distinguished Service Cross in 2003, and the Congressional Medal of Honor in 2015.
D16. Cross-section view of indigenous workers in a Potosí silver mine, Theodor de Bry, engraving, ca.1590. Silver miners, virtually enslaved, in Bolivia.
D17. A display of animal traps from Oneida.
D18. Overview of Frenchman Flat, Looking West, Nevada Test Site, 1997, photograph by Emmet Gowin. Bomb craters, left by the underground detonations of many nuclear bombs, pockmark the Nevada desert.
D19. Drawing of the Normandy landing in 1944.
D20. Homeless people sheltering under a bridge, England.
D21. Une Bombe au Cafe Terminus: the arrest of Émile Henry, anarchist bomber, in Paris, February 12, 1894. Chromolithograph.
D22. The Hill Cumorah, painting by Carl Christian Anton Christensen, 1800s. Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, holding the gold plates he has just been given by the angel Moroni (who appears in A5).
D23. A great mob of local men, having broken into the jail, massacring a group of defenseless Sicilian immigrant prisoners, whom they accused of having murdered the New Orleans police chief, New Orleans, late 1891. None of them had been convicted in court.
D24. The Polyorama, a sort of diorama, a popular entertainment, with a crowd of spectators.
D25. A young man shooting his father dead, late 1800s, New York. (His father, cowering, is seen at N1, an eight-tag piece.)
D26. The Lynching of Lige Daniels, Center, Texas, Aug. 2, 1920, postcard. Lynching photographs were often made into postcards to sell as souvenirs to members of the public.
D27. Buried-alive execution, engraving by Gustave Doré, 1863. Dante and Virgil observing people immersed heads down in the Inferno (La Divina Commedia, Inferno, Canto XIX), among them former Pope Niccolò III, damned for simony, i.e., the selling of Church offices, etc., or fraud in general. (Virgil is cropped out of view here.) This is the Eighth Circle of Hell, for the Fraudulent, which includes Panderers and Seducers, Flatterers, Simonists, Sorcerers, False Prophets, Grafters, Hypocrites, Thieves, Evil Counselors, Sowers of Discord, and Falsifiers. Does that remind you of anyone you know?
© Copyright Allen Schill, 2020. All rights reserved. Anyone is welcome to use the above for any educational, cultural, journalistic, or other non-commercial purpose, or to cite passages for a review, but I would be very glad to be notified and linked.