"Founded at the pinnacle of the British Empire, the [Manchester Museum] is now undergoing a rethink..."

"... led by its director Esme Ward. In her post since 2018, Ward wants to make the free-of-charge institution more inclusive, imaginative and caring. She has repatriated 43 ceremonial and sacred objects to Aboriginal communities in Australia, and appointed a curator to re-examine the collections from an Indigenous perspective.... 'All of us in museums have a responsibility to really think about who they are for, not just what they are for,' Ward said in a recent interview in her office, which has a velvet sofa and a framed poster reading 'No Sexists, No Racists, No Fascists.' Calling museums 'empathy machines,' she said their mission extended beyond caring for objects and collections to 'caring for beliefs and ideas and relationships,' and being 'a space that brings people together.'"

From "A Museum Pivots to Become 'an Empathy Machine'/The Manchester Museum in England was founded at the pinnacle of the British Empire. Now it is embracing the city’s South Asian population and reassessing the colonial past" (NYT).

Empathy machines.

Empathy machines.

Empathy machines.

What if there were a machine that could manufacture empathy? It would be a torture device! What did your literal mind — if you have one — picture? I thought first of the machine in Kafka's "Penal Colony," then of the device strapped to Malcolm McDowell's head in "A Clockwork Orange."

But, you may say, a museum that's an empathy machine cannot be a torture device because nobody is forced to go to the museum or to stay there, but that's not true. Kids are forced. 

Why would someone who loves art — does Ms. Ward love art?! — think of the museum as a machine? To help you think about her thinking, here's art about a machine, Paul Klee's "Twittering Machine":

Extra background:

"I come to this blog for the hodology!"

Said kwenzel, in the first post of the day, which is about the meaning of "path."

Wikipedia knows...



... what the OED does not:



"Homology" is the quality of sameness.


"Podology" is the branch of medicine that deals with the feet — a less-familiar alternative to "podiatry."

"Chorology" is the study of the geographical extent or limit of something (for example, crayfish).

"Horology" is the science of measuring time. The "hor-" attached to "-ology" just means "hour."

"Codology" is a specifically Irish sort of hoaxing. The OED quotes James Joyce — "The why and the wherefore and all the codology of the business" — and the Daily Express (1928) — "There is in Ireland a science unknown to us in England called Codology... The English is ‘leg-pulling’... When I received an invitation to breakfast at the Dublin Zoo I thought that I could detect the hand of the chief codologist."

It's the "-ology" ending stuck on "cod," which is a slang term for a hoax or joke. Here's James Joyce again:

You went there when you wanted to do something... And behind the door of one of the closets there was a drawing in red pencil of a bearded man in a Roman dress with a brick in each hand and underneath was the name of the drawing:

Balbus was building a wall.

Some fellow had drawn it there for a cod. It had a funny face but it was very like a man with a beard.... Perhaps that was why they were there because it was a place where some fellows wrote things for cod....

But back to "hodology," which Wikipedia says is "the study of pathways." I click on the Wikipedia links to "Psychology," "Philosophy," "Geology," and "Neuroscience," and the word "hodology" appears on none of the pages. Is this a cod? I don't know. But I love the drawing on the page for neuroscience...



Drawing by Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1899) of neurons in the pigeon cerebellum. It takes me back to one of my favorite subjects, How to Draw Like Paul Klee.

Breitbart — now with Bannon — covers Trump's Afghanistan speech.

A screen shot of the front page right now:



Key word: "Flip-flop."

Seemingly ready-made joke that contains a pop-culture reference you might need to be over 40 to get: "…HIS MCMASTER’S VOICE."

Whether you get the reference or not, you might be interested to know that Wikipedia has a page for "His Master's Voice":

His Master's Voice, abbreviated HMV, is a famous trademark in the music and recording industry and was the unofficial name of a major British record label [parent of RCA]. The name was coined in the 1890s as the title of a painting of a dog....



[T]he dog, a terrier named Nipper, had originally belonged to Barraud's brother, Mark. When Mark Barraud died, Francis inherited Nipper, with a cylinder phonograph and recordings of Mark's voice. Francis noted the peculiar interest that the dog took in the recorded voice of his late master emanating from the horn, and conceived the idea of committing the scene to canvas....

In 1968, RCA introduced a modern logo and restricted the use of Nipper to the album covers of Red Seal Records. The Nipper trademark was reinstated to most RCA record labels in the Western Hemisphere beginning in late 1976 and was once again widely used in RCA advertising throughout the late 1970s and 1980s....

"His Master's Voice" is also the title of a sci-fi book by Stanisław Lem:

It is a densely philosophical first contact story about an effort by scientists to decode, translate and understand an extraterrestrial transmission.... [T]he scientists are able to use part of the data to synthesize a substance with unusual properties. Two variations are created: a glutinous liquid nicknamed "Frog Eggs" and a more solid version that looks like a slab of red meat called "Lord of the Flies" (named for its strange agitating effect on insects brought into proximity with it, rather than for the allegorical meaning of the name).... "Frog eggs" seems to enable a teleportation of an atomic blast at the speed of light to a remote location, which would make deterrence impossible....

By the time the project is ended, they are no more sure than they were in the beginning about whether the signal was a message from intelligent beings that humanity failed to decipher, or a poorly understood natural phenomenon.

But back to Breitbart. It's easier to understand than Lem's frog eggs. I'm not going to read all these articles. As a collection of headlines, they make a spicy first page, but I'm just going to use a sampling method by clicking on one. I choose "Flynn: An Old Casino King Doubles Down on a Bad Hand in Afghanistan." Flynn is a Daniel J. Flynn, not Michael Flynn, the general who used to have Trump's ear, and the headline distracted me into thinking Trump's old confidant had taken a swipe at him. No sooner do I succumb to the click than I get the feeling there's nothing here that isn't already understood from the headline, which now looks like a one-liner for a late-night talk-show host.

But Trump himself introduced the idea that he's playing a card game. From the text of the speech:

No one denies that we have inherited a challenging and troubling situation in Afghanistan and South Asia, but we do not have the luxury of going back in time and making different or better decisions. When I became President, I was given a bad and very complex hand, but I fully knew what I was getting into: big and intricate problems. But, one way or another, these problems will be solved -- I'm a problem solver -- and, in the end, we will win.

He didn't say "I was dealt a bad and very complex hand," nor did he say "we will play to win." He didn't stress the card-playing metaphor, and but — by using the word "hand" — Trump played into the hands of comedians and headline writers who easily connect his presidential rhetoric to his old work in the gambling business.

The term "double down" comes from blackjack: "to double the bet after one has seen the initial cards, with the requirement that one and only one additional card be drawn." That's the OED, which explains the extended use: "to engage in risky behaviour, esp. when one is already in a dangerous situation." I'm fascinated by one of the examples, from a 1991 set of essays by Joseph Epstein called "Line Out of a Walk."

Epstein's weird title is easily understood once you learn that the artist Paul Klee described how he draws by saying, "I take a line out for a walk." And if that interests you, remember I have a whole series of blog posts called "How to draw/paint like Paul Klee," including "Approximating biomorphs," which sounds frog-egg-related, and see how this blog post is taking a line out for a walk?

Anyway, Epstein's quote, illustrating how to use "double down," is "Let me double down..and see if I can't win some points for being a racist by asserting that, for some while now, black men have worn hats with more flair than anyone else in America."

And that's where this walk abruptly ends, because Amazon's "look inside" feature excludes the page with that quote and there's no Kindle edition. I'll just assume the venerable essayist is only joking about being a racist, back in 1991 when smart white people were comfortable with the notion that everyone is racist and exposing a detail of one's own particular racism felt like a mark of sophistication. 

Flight of the Pelikan/Drawing like Paul Klee.

Maybe you remember the series of blog posts, back in 2014, How to draw/paint like Paul Klee. I'd found the notebook about which I'd once written:

I have a notebook of drawings/writings done at a big Paul Klee show, done in London in about 2003, just before starting this blog. I'd like to copy the pages and blog it. I was analyzing/riffing on the... ideas that he used.

Wonder where I put that.

And I did a series of posts about what were really instructions based on particular works, including Lesson 7, which included: "using a single line lazy eight movement, make a tree in the center w/ suitable background." If I look back at the post now, I can see the actual Paul Klee work that led me to write that, but today, as I was sitting at the café with the old notebook, I saw only the instructions, and I loosely took the instructions to heart as I idly worked my new Pelikan pen into the pages of the old, old notebook as we carried on an elaborate conversation:





Does that seem absurdly unconnected to the instructions? First, those are efforts ##2 and 3. Here's #1:

Lesson 10.

We arrive at the last page of my notebook of instructions on how to draw/paint like Paul Klee — written at this 2002 exhibition. There are only 2 instructions, and I can only find an image for the second one. It's easy when there is a title, and in the case of the one without the title, kind of impossible.

• Incise lines of city-book/garden/book in thick impasto color patchwork.

• Slather white gesso on dark paper & write "Secret Letters" in charcoal.

Below is the scan of the page. I don't think the drawing at the bottom is a copy of anything, just an effort to practice the use of a horizontal lines to develop a form. The book continues with similar experiments, but no more written instructions.

Lesson 9: How to draw/paint like Paul Klee.

Do not click through to the arcana unless you are truly one of those struck with the strange desire to understand the works of Paul Klee. No one else is wanted in here. Move on if you don't know what this is about.

Shapes in center, pattern around/Pattern all over, pick out shape.

I seem to have finally extracted the a generic formula for how to draw/paint like Paul Klee (in my rediscovered notes from the 2002 exhibition):



So that's Lesson 8 in the series. Are you getting it? Below that formula seem to be observations on particular artworks, 2 of which have titles and can easily be discovered. Click on the links to view those 2:

Approximating biomorphs.

Here comes Lesson 7 in the continuing series How to draw/paint like Paul Klee. Click the "Paul Klee" tag for more lessons and more of an explanation. Here's the transcription from the next page of that notebook I wrote at an exhibition in London in 2002:

• "Vegetable — Physiognomic" — Plants superimposed on a face.

• "Strange Plants"

• using a single line lazy eight movement, make a tree in the center w/ suitable background. Paint in yellow & green. Background is horizon line only & dark blue sky grading to light blue green at horizon. Dappled ground.

 It's frustrating that the most elaborate description is the one without a title, but I found what I'm sure is that tree:



"Fig Tree" is the title of that 1929 watercolor. As for "Vegetable-Physiognomic" (1921) and "Strange Plants" (1921), these were easy to find, and I've opted to brighten and sharpen these images a bit:

The tightrope act on top of the head, the potted plant in the pelvis, the reclining body, and the possible chair.

Lesson 6 in the series "How to draw/paint like Paul Klee" — explained here — based on notes I took at an exhibition in London in 2002. What follows, next to each of the 4 bullet points, is text from one page of the book, followed by the image I'd meant to remember in the abstract and to apply, in the concrete reality of a drawing/painting that might resemble the original in some way or not at all.

• draw a tightrope & trapeze act up on top of a woman's head ("Tightrope Walker")



• Draw a vicious plant inside the tormented figure of a woman reaching up at a sprig of 3 cherries ("Pathos of Fertility") Plant is a potted plant — pot = pelvis

At the Klee-and-Me Café...

... where were you in 2002?

(Images explained here. With more at "Only reason to analyze art is to figure out how to copy it.")

ADDED: I'm fascinated by what I missed/changed in trying to memorialize a drawing I wanted to be able to use. I put the top left eye outside of the line of the face and missed the way the right eye's edge extends just a tad over the line of the face and obviously didn't want to bother with that business hanging down from it. I lost the scrunched-uppedness of the nose and mouth on the lower face, and — as I see it now — have ended up with a caricature of my own mother. Meanwhile, Klee's face looks a bit like Roger Ebert.

Only reason to analyze art is to figure out how to copy it.

That's my insight — probably intended as a bit of a joke and not a 100% truth — written in a notebook in 2002 as I studied the exhibition "Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation" at the Hayward Gallery in London.



You can see the "→ Only reason to analyze art is to figure out how to copy it" appears after a quote from Paul Klee, which I transcribed from the gallery wall into the notebook: "Visual art never begins w/ a poetic mood or idea but with building one or several figures, w/ harmonizing a few colors & tones, or w/ calculating spatial relationships." I found this old NYT review of the exhibition, and it contains the next sentence after that: "Whether an idea then joins in is completely irrelevant; it may do, it doesn't have to.''

At the top of that notebook page is what — in this series of blog posts on the notebook — should be called Lesson 5 of How to draw/paint like Paul Klee.

• leave white blank small hole in gray washed rectangle. Add subsequent gray wash to build a pattern of black & gray squares surrounding. ("Study in Chiaroscuro.")

How delightful to read those old instructions and be able to find the artwork in question. An amazing amount of artistic crapola comes up if you do a Google image search on that title. But I restricted it with the artist's name, and found — after eliminating this — the painting that it must have been:



This success makes me want to go back to the 2 works analyzed in yesterday's post, the ones where I'd failed to record the title:

• Make a city based on placement of vertical lines on a field of unevenly spaced horizontal lines. Erase some of the horiz. lines to make "buildings," make lines in the sky closer together & lines in the foreground farther apart. add some deep doorways & steeples

• Start center bottom & build a structure of whimsical heads & bodies balanced one atop the other. At the top a head w/2 unequal eyes & a tear-like "fishing line" hanging from the bigger eye. Give whole structure a sense of weighted balance.

Ah! Success! The first one is almost surely "Picture of a City (Red-Green Accents)":



The second one is undoubtedly "An Equilibrium Caprice":

How to draw/paint like Paul Klee — Lessons 3 and 4.

As explained here, I rediscovered my 2002 notebook that extracts simple rules from individual works of art by Paul Klee. I've found images of the works where I can, and these appear above the relevant transcription from the notebook. At the bottom are the scans from my notebooks. The idea is to enhance perception of the original, but also to give anyone a way to get going into a drawing/painting that would have value on its own.



• Oil transfer method on watercolor ground — "The Great Emperor Rides to War." Bands of horizontal lines — less straight — one band is the lines of his smile lips — Architectural & symbolic shapes built into the figure. One central man.



• Horizontal pen lines. Dots, circles or crescents on the lines. Then vertically connect the shapes — okay to angle & curve on the vertical way down. "Drawing Knotted in the Manner of a Net" (Musical notation)

How to draw and paint like Paul Klee.

As I said the other day, I found the notebook I wrote as I studied an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Paul Klee. (It was "Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation" at the Hayward Gallery in March 2002, intelligently reviewed here in The Guardian.)

Here's the first page of notes — Lessons 1 and 2 — extracting how-to instructions from a painting and a drawing:



Text, with links to the artworks from which I extracted the instructions:

• draw ink lines almost with a straight edge horizontally all over bristol board. Vertically: some straight lines perpendicular & some angled. Not evenly spaced. Indications of steepled buildings & a few skeletal trees. Oil paint w/o blue. Some zebra columns. Landscape With Yellow Steeple

• draw a funny man in the center of the page in ink, then draw horizontal straight but not evenly spaced lines all across bending at the contours of the man — Rider Unhorsed & Bewitched

From the above-linked Guardian article:

In his last years Klee was afflicted by scleroderma, a horrifying disease that slowly mummifies its victims. All his lithe mobility impeded, he relied more and more on pure abstraction to articulate his visions. The brush becomes broader, the colours more dazzling. The language is liberated into a grand and commanding song. 

Scleroderma is the disease that killed my maternal grandmother.

ADDED: I've given you the links to the images I used to make my instructions, but the point of the instructions is to give you an idea of something to do to produce your own artwork, which isn't supposed to copy the original. Check out the original, but then forget the original and just follow the instructions. I chose to write the instructions in this very concrete and mechanical way so you — so I — could make a completely different artwork. And I consider the instructions themselves to be an independent artwork.

Mondrian kept an artificial flower, painted white, in his studio to express the feeling of "the lack of a woman in his daily life."

According to the card stuck to the wall in a London museum next to a 1926 photograph by André Kertész, which you can see here. The white paint — we were told by some curator — was "to banish entirely any recollection of the green he found so intolerable."

I copied those words down in my notebook in 2002 — the last time I was in London — along with a sort of diagram of the composition of the photograph:



That scan comes from a notebook I found, a notebook that — back in 2013 — I had talked about losing:

I have a notebook of drawings/writings done at a big Paul Klee show, done in London in about 2003, just before starting this blog. I'd like to copy the pages and blog it. I was analyzing/riffing on the... ideas that he used.

Wonder where I put that.

Back then, betamax3000 had said: "NOW you are teasing me. I want that post." Okay, I will get around to that. I have 9 pages of notes, which, if I remember correctly from 12 years ago, were intended to be the code-broken instructions for how to draw/paint like Paul Klee. But for now, you'll have to consider the womanlessness of Piet Mondrian.



Expressed by Yves Saint Laurent: