Tag Archives: Radiolab

Truth is Better than Fiction: Story of a Stolen Rembrandt

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_73727275_rembrandtafp2 Rembrandt’s Child with Soap Bubble, above, was recently apprehended in France after a 15-year disappearance. Originally taken from two con-men with links to the backroom art world trade, the story of this painting’s disappearance is actual much more fantastic and less ordinary. As ARTNews reports, Frenchmen Patrick Vialaneix was compelled to steal it: 

He first saw the Rembrandt, L’enfant à la bulle de savon (Child with soap bubble), at age 13 on a visit with his mother to the municipal museum in Draguignan, France. It reminded him of himself so much that viewing it was “like looking in a mirror,” he said. He became obsessed with the painting, returning over and over to behold its charms.

His fixation escalated until finally, at the age of 28, he decided he had to steal it.

Read the rest of the story on ARTNews to learn how the alarm technician managed to steal it, and how the secret of the stolen painting then poisoned his relationships until he decided to sell it to the two middlemen who the French authorities finally caught. I absolutely understand the urge to want a work of art, perhaps a Rembrandt or a Vermeer for your very own, and if that means hiding a painting under my bed for 15 years, so be it.

But why we would invest any singular painting with such significance is perhaps a strange thing. Copyists were common before the age of mechanical reproduction, and today especially copying has never been easier. But the aura of the original remains intact, even though rationally we might realize that any object is just one of many objects whose physical properties can be reproduced. The latest Radiolab podcast, appropriately titled Things, is worth a listen for an exploration of why we sometimes place intense emotional value on objects. The Radiolab story discusses things in general, not art, and the crux of the discussion on whether its not better to let go, as Patrick Vialaneix finally did, or to hold on as tightly as possible.

Color Redux

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A run down of great links on color, what it is and how we see it as well as how other species perceive it, how our perception has changed historically, and what we could see in the future:

  • Secondly, two articles that borrow heavily from the Radiolab episode but goes on to address how naming colors impacts our ability to see them in more detail: here and here.
  • Thirdly, a TED Talk by an artist who has never seen color but, thanks to a device he has created, can now hear it: here.

And I’ll throw in some of my own posts to round things off:

RGB Colorspace Atlas by Tara Auerbach and Mantis Shrimp
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2012/07/rgb-colorspace-atlas-and-mantis-shrimp.html
Making Color: about Victoria Finlay’s history of color
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/color.html
Celadon Talking Jars
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/celadon-talking-jars.html
Black’s historical uses
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/back-to-black.html
based on ARTNews’s article
http://www.artnews.com/2011/11/24/the-color-that-wasn%E2%80%99t-a-color/
The making of red, orange, and yellow
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/red-orange-yellow.html

RGB Colorspace Atlas and Mantis Shrimp

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RGB Colorspace Atlas, Volume 2 (2011)
As part of Ecstatic Alphabets, MoMA has a set Tauba Auerbach’s colorful books on view. These three thick objects display every color the human eye can see in a three-dimensional, ordered way. The museum plaque probably describes the project best:

“Human eyes typically have three types of color receptors on their retinas, each sensitive to a different range of wavelengths of light. The colors associated with these wavelengths are approximately red, green, and blue. Because there are three types of color receptors, it is possible to map the visible spectrum in a three-dimensional spatial model by assigning red, green, and blue each to a dimension. It is then possible to outline a cube in this space, where the values of red, green, and blue are visible on a gradient scale of 0 – 100% in their respective dimensions. These gradients combine to create the RGB color space cube, a volume in which any color can be located by a set of three coordinates. RGB Colorspace Atlas, both a sculptural object and spatialization of color, consists of three books. Each volume contains the entire visible spectrum mapped out over 3,632 pages, representing the RGB cube sliced in a different direction: vertically, horizontally, and from front to back.”

Of course, the volumes at MoMA were behind glass cases, so no one can flip through them. This video helps you imagine it though: 

Radiolab recently did a fascinating episode on color (bringing in Victoria Finlay, whose book I wrote about, as a guest). As the Auerbach blurb notes, human eyes typically have three types of color receptors (although a few women may have four through a quirk of genetics). However, some animals have many more–and thus see many more wavelengths, and colors, than we can imagine. The technicolor mantis shrimp has 16 kinds of color receptors. Can you imagine what the world looks like to it? Or, for that matter, what an attempt at spatial representation of its color spectrum would look like?

For more about woman with four kinds of color receptors, the discovery of color, whether color existed in the same way to Homer and the ancient Greeks, and much more, I highly recommend the Radiolab episode.