Pictures like this always make me laugh because the people who make them/like them/share them (which let’s face it is mostly men) like to pretend that they haven’t been doing this exact shit with all the “waves” of feminism. Ever since women started fighting for the right to vote, they painted those women as angry, selfish, violent people for having the audacity to demand to be treated like a human being. People who try to make pictures like this one just pretend that there wasn’t propaganda against women fighting for basic human rights, propaganda that is JUST LIKE THE ONE ABOVE. because it’s so much easier to paint an ugly picture of someone or something you hate instead of actually listening or try to understand. It’s so much easier to pretend you’re a better/smarter person because you don’t want things to change when your the one benefiting from it.
Reblogging for the comment
antifeminists have been repeating ad nauseam the same bullshit misogynist rhetoric for over a hundred years. call them out on it.
For those who don’t know and don’t want to click thru to find out: Jonas Salk is the reason we in North America no longer live in terror of polio. He also refused to patent or profit from his vaccine. He also spent the last years of his life researching a vaccine for AIDS, long before that was cool and back when a lot of people were secretly hoping it really would just kill all the gays. So you’re damn right people applauded and gave free upgrades.
Reblogging again because this time I did click through, and because of the times in which we live: Jonas Salk was Jewish, and the child of immigrants.
A remarkable Jacobean re-emergence after 200 years of yellowing varnish Courtesy Philip Mould
PAINT RESTORATION OF MESMERIZING
I saw this on Twitter. He’s using acetone, but a cellulose ether has been added to make it into a gel (probably Klucel—this entire gel mixture is sometimes just called Klucel by restorers, but Klucel is specifically the stuff that makes the gel).
Normally, acetone is too volatile for restoration, but when it’s a gel, it becomes very stable and a) stays on top of the porous surface of the painting, and b) won’t evaporate. So it can eat up the varnish.
It looks scary, but acetone has no effect on oils, and jelly acetone is even less interactive with the surface of the paint or canvas.
Will someone PLEASE clean the mona lisa
For those who are wondering, they cleaned a copy of the Mona Lisa made by one of Da Vinchi’s students, and here’s a side by side comparison:
CLEAN THE FUCKING MONA LISA.
A couple problems with cleaning the Mona Lisa:
The Mona Lisa is a glazed painting.
A Direct Painting is one in which the artist mixes a large amount of paint of the correct value and shade the first time, and applies it to the painting. A Glazed Paintingis a painting in which an underpainting is painted, generally in shades of gray or brown, and a allowed to dry, before layers of very thin glaze – a mixture of a tiny bit of pigment and a lot of oil – is applied to the surface. Some artists, such as Leonardo, choose to work this way because it provides an incredible sense of light and illumination (look at how the real Mona Lisa seems to glow).
The Mona Lisa is an incredible work of glazed painting, but that makes it fragile, so fragile that many conservators don’t want to work on it because it’s extremely difficult and a conservation effort go wrong for many many reasons. One of the reasons it could go wrong is that the glazes and the varnish layers are actually a very similar chemical composition, and a conservator could accidentally strip off layers of glaze while removing the varnish.
In fact, in 1809 during its first restoration when they stripped off the varnish, they also stripped off some of the top paint layers, which has caused the painting to look more washed out than Leonardo painted it.
The Mona Lisa also has a frankly ridiculous amount of glaze layers on it, as Leonardo considered it incomplete up until he died, He actually took it with him when he left Italy (fleeing charges of homosexuality), meaning it never even got to the family who had commissioned it, and instead constantly altered it, trying to get it just a touch more perfect every time. That makes it really fragile, with countless layers of very thin paint, many of which have cracked, warped, flaked, or discolored. It’s not just the top layer, its layers and layers of glazing throughout the painting that have slowly discolored or been damaged over time.
Speaking of damage, look at the cracking. That’s called craquelure; it happens with many painting’s (even ones that aren’t painted with this technique) because the paint shrinks as it dries, or the surface it’s painted on warps. Notice that the other painting has very little of it, even though it’s almost the same age.
The reason the Mona Lisa has so much craquelure is because Leonardo was highly experimental, almost to the point of it being his biggest flaw. There were established painting techniques, and then there were Leonardo’s painting techniques. The established painting techniques were created in order to insure longevity and quality, but Leonardo didn’t stick to any of them. This has made his work a ticking time bomb of deterioration.
Don’t believe me, check it out:
This is how most people think The Last Supper looks
But this is actually a copy done by Andrea Solari in 1520.
The actual Last Supper looks like this:
The Last Supper has been painstakingly and teadiously restored, with conservators sometimes working on sections as small as 4 cm a day. To get to it you’ve got to walk through a series of airlocks (AIRLOCKS!?!?!) and they only allow 15 people at a time because the moisture from your breath and your skin particles will damage it. Despite all of the precautions and restoration, it still looks like that.
This is because Leonardo painted the last supper using highly experimental methods. He didn’t use the traditional wet-into-wet method that fresco painters used, and insead painted onto the dry plaster on the wall, meaning the paint did not chemically adhere. Before he even died the painting had already begun to flake. It’s a miracle it’s still there at all.
They’ve done what restoration they can on The Last Supper because the painting will absolutely disappear if they don’t. The Mona Lisa, which is delicate, but much more stable, doesn’t need the same kind of attention. And, like many of his works, is just too delicate to touch, and the risk of doing irreparable damage to it is far too high. The Mona Lisa is insured for something like 800 million dollars, and that’s a lot of money to be ruined by one wrong brush stroke. (fun fact: the most expensive painting ever sold was also a Leonardo, the Salvator Mundi, and it went for 450 million dollars.)
Furthermore, there are probably only 20 or so authenticated Leonardo paintings in the whole world. If you look through the list, most of them aren’t even fully done by him, are disputed, or aren’t even finished. It’s simply too difficult and too risky to restore the Mona Lisa, one of Leonardo’s only finished and mostly intact works, when there’s hardly any more of his paintings to fall back on.
Now the painting you see in the video above is 200 years old, not 600 years old, and I assure you, the conservators decided the risk to restore it was minimal (after extensive research, paint testing, x-raying, gamma radiation, etc.) and that the work they were doing was worth the risk based on the painting’s value.
Conservators make the decision all the time about how much they can do for a painting, because really, they have the ability to completely strip a painting of all varnish and glazes and just repaint the whole thing (which happens to a lot of badly damaged paintings, especially when there’s no way to save them – one of the very small museums in my area recently deaccessioned a Monet because it was barely original, and no one wants to look at a Monet that’s only 20% Monet’s work) – but doing that to the Mona Lisa, removing the artist’s hand from the most famous piece of artwork in history? Hell No.
(also, I’m not a conservator but I’ll be applying to a conservation grad program sometime next year, so sorry if any of my info is at all inaccurate)
I found this really interesting, thanks for sharing.
so i was searching scanned archives of historical books for references to the names of the amis outside of les mis, like you do, in order to try and find clues for why hugo picked the names that he did. i found a few things (which i’ll make a post about later), but i wasn’t having much luck overall… until i found this sentence in a french scientific journal (Cosmos: revue des sciences et de leurs applications) from 1895:
for those of you who don’t speak french, allow me to translate:
A Frenchman by the name of Pierre Grantaire has, near Philadelphia (United States), the largest spider “farm.”
…okay cosmos, you have my attention. the full article is even better:
and another rough translation:
The art of giving bottled wine the appearance of age. – More and more things are counterfeited in our age. This is why there are forged diamonds and other precious stones, ivory, gold, rubber. Now, here’s an example found in the sale of phony old wines, that is, wine stored in bottles having the appearance of age. To make bottles appear older and obtain a better price for their contents, a new industry was created, that of spider cultivation. A Frenchman by the name of Pierre Grantaire has, near Philadelphia (United States), the largest spider “farm.” His stock usually consists of thousands of spiders originating mostly from the selection of spiders imported from France.
This industry also exists in the Loire region, but on a smaller scale. There are however ten establishments devoted to the cultivation of spiders in this department. These spiders are sold for around 60 francs per hundred, and the clientele consists of french wine-growers who use them for a clever, if not recommendable, purpose.
Three months after the introduction of 60 francs’ worth of spiders to a newly stocked wine cellar, the bottles are covered from cork to cork in spiderwebs. The uneducated person, seeing these bottles completely covered in spiderwebs, naturally concludes that the wine which they contain is old, and so one can get a better price for it.
COUNTERFEIT WINE
SPIDER-FARMER GRANTAIRE
IS A THING
and it gets better — apparently this story went “viral,” in a nineteenth-century sense, appearing throughout different american newspapers and journals, including the scientific fucking american. here’s an excerpt from the story about it in the hartford locomotive:
aka:
“average ami raises 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average ami eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Grantaire, who lives in pennsylvania & raises over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted”
here’s the headline of the san francisco call’s article:
HE HAS A MOTHERFUCKING SPIDER FARM.
the text of the article (which we can all read because it is available online, thank the old gods and the new) includes an interview with spiders grantaire, in which he waxes rhapsodically about his charges in exactly the way that you imagine the grantaire of les mis would:
“They think I feed them now,” said Pierre, “but I ford them for you. They have brains, these little creatures. Ah, they are cunning. After you see them and I tell you of them you will not oush them more. You will say, ‘The spider can teach me something. I will Watch him. He is a diplomat, an architect, a mathematician. His knowledge is worth having.’ Ah, there is a fine fellcw running on your neck. Don’t knock him off. He will not bite you. They are harmless. He wishes to give you a bon jour and make your acquaintance. […] “But what money is there in it, you ask. Men Dieu, money, money—always money. I, who love my pets, to be always thinking of what they sell for! I will tell you now, and then you will talk no more of money, and I can show you something. A customer comes to me. He is a wine merchant from New York or Philadelphia, or perhaps he writes. He says that he has just stocked a cellar with five-year-old port or Burgundy, or something else. The bottles have brushed clean in shipping. They look like new and common. They will not sell for old wine. He has attached to them labels of twenty, thirty or forty years ago, some year of a grand vintage. He tells me so many hundred bottles. I know how many of my pets will soon cover his cellar in cobwebs of the finest old kind. I put them in little small paper boxes, a pair in a box. I ship then, in a crate, with many holes for air. Maybe I send 200, 300 or 400 spiders. For them I ask half a franc each, si, for every hundred. In two months you would think his cellar was not disturbed for the last forty years. It has cost him $40, or $50 maybe, but he may sell the wine for $1,000 —yes, more than that—above what it had brought without any pets had dressed the bottles in robes of long ago.”
one million stories, please, about a grantaire who miraculously survives the barricade and moves to the united states where he starts a spider farm and keeps the flame of the revolution alive by bilking snobby fat cats out of their wine money.
If y’all didn’t realize I was going to research the crap out of this just because I could, you clearly don’t understand this blog at all.
So, first off, I seriously doubt there was ever a French military veteran farmer named Pierre Grantaire who moved to Pennsylvania to help wine merchants defraud people and had pet spiders named after Zola and Sarah Bernhardt.
I know it’s sad. And I can’t prove there wasn’t. But you have to understand that “there were articles in a bunch of 19th century newpapers and the notes sections of some scientific journals” is basically the equivalent, accuracy-wise, of saying “I saw it on my tumblr dash”. Which is to say, they shamelessly made stuff up. All the time. And then shamelessly copied it off each other.
I can tell you that there was no person by the name of Grantaire living anywhere in Pennsylvania in the 1880 or 1900 US censuses, though, and nobody with a name even close to Grantaire who was born in France and lived there. (The 1890 records were destroyed in a fire.)
Plus there’s the fact, as needsmoreresearch pointed out, that if you want to make a cellar look spider-y, you don’t use pretty garden spiders that weave neat patterns, you use the cellar spiders that use the fluffy dusty cobwebby silk, which could be a question of art as proposed in needsmoreresearch’s post, but it seems like if you were actually committing fraud you’d go for authenticity over symmetry.
And the earliest version of this story I can find, after checking a bunch of databases, is in the April 16th Edition of the St. Paul Daily Globe. I can’t guarantee that’s the original source, since digitizing of American newspapers is still pretty patchy, but I’d make a fair bet that it is. It’s the full long-form article and includes all the quotes and wording that were copied in the other publications and tbh it really reads like a 19th century newspaper hoax.
Also, unlike any of the other papers, the Daily Globe was advertising it over a week in advance as one of their cool weird stories in the Sunday edition, which none of the other papers did. Including, for several days, under the headline “NOT A FREAK SHEET”. Daily Globe, methinks you may protest too much.
Now you may think it’s sad if this dude did not exist. But. Just imagine: A bunch of Globe reporters just off their alcohol-soaked lunch break, BS-ing about the most click-bait-y hoax stories they can come up with, and one of them says, “I need a name for a weird old rambly French dude who really likes spiders” and another immediately says “Grantaire. Definitely Grantaire.”
And since the ONLY results in Google Books for the word “Grantaire” in all of the 1890s are a) this story, and b) editions of Les Miserables, I am absolutely sure that whoever proposed that name was a Les Mis fan.
In other words, this is totally somebody’s modern-US-AU Grantaire headcanon from the 1890s that got reblogged a lot and is still merrily going viral 125 years later, because Mis fandom never dies.
“Les Mis memes last 3 years” factoid actually just statistical error. Les Mis memes last 1 month if they’re lucky. Spiders Grantaire, a meme going viral for over 125 years and still going strong is a statistical outlier and should not have been counted.
Le Sommeil [The Sleepers], which depicts two women entwined in a post-coital embrace, caused a stir when it was first shown in the 1870s. The police were called in, and the painting was not shown again until the 1980s. But its brief showing had an influence on a number of contemporary artists, and helped challenge the taboos associated with lesbian relationships. For modern audiences it’s a good reminder that people in the 19th century were not ignorant of lesbian relationships, as we tend to believe. And it’s pretty damn sexy, don’t you think?
They called the police on this lesbian painting.
The best part is, the lesbian embrace isn’t even the biggest thing that made the painting so controversial, it was the art style. People in the artistic community at the time were wholly familiar with sapphic relationships being portrayed in art, but were used to these scenes being portrayed in the ‘academic art’ style, which consisted of smooth, simplistic, idealised versions of the nude female form. This often went hand in hand with the depiction of Roman & Greek allegories to illustrate certain ideals (think Cabanel’s Birth of Venus). Courbet’s journey into realism was met by heavy critique from the academic movement, as the women he painted were, well, more realistic. Leaving in details such as the rolls of fat around the ribs acted as a blunt reminder to the audience that these were not euphoric goddesses caressing in ecstasy, but ordinary women having a nap together after making love. Other realist paintings suffered the same controversy, Manet’s Olympia is a perfect example, where the problem was not that the painting depicted a nude woman in an erotic pose, but the fact that she was just an ordinary courtesan, given an identity & portrayed in a place of power & control. Realism humanized the female form in art, & removed it from its previous role as a representation of the ideal.
So what disgusted people about the painting wasn’t so much that Le Sommeil depicted two women, but rather that it depicted two ‘real’ women.
No but the history behind this picture is really interesting
The reason that everyone always looked miserable in old photos wasn’t that they took too long to take. Once photography became widespread it took only seconds to take a picture.
It was because getting your photo taken was treated the same as getting your portrait painted. A very serious occasion meant so thst your descendants would know that ypu existed and what you looked like.
But one time some British dudes went to china to go on an anthropological expedition, and they met some rural Chinese farmers and decided to take their pictures. Now, these people weren’t exposed to the weird culture of the time around getting your photo taken, so this guy just flashed a big grin during the photo because he was told to strike a pose and that’s the pose he wanted to strike.
I think painted portraits and old photos give us the idea that in general people were just really unhappy because those are the visuals we have. This is so refreshing.
Hey, look; “Man Laughing Alone With Rice” is back on my dash.
