Harry Ransom Center

Viz Partners with Harry Ransom Center for Spring Exhibitions

This biography of Marc Chagall discusses his Hasidic upbringing, his escape from Europe during World War II, and the influence of war on his work.

This blog post by Jay Voss analyzes the elements of the first page of the New Testament in the King James Bible.

Steven Lemieux's blog post about Eric Gill's Golden Calf considers representations of calves as both virile and innocent, as both animals and gods.

This blog post from Harry Ransom Center curator Danielle Sigler describes the King James Bibles influences on campus and in culture.

Jacob Lawrence's memories of Adam Clayton Powell Sr.'s sermons at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York are detailed here by viz. blogger Ty Alyea.

This short and highly amusing video shows how the King James Bible has influenced the English language.

You can read more about Jacob Lawrence's life growing up in Harlem and his work during the Civil rights movement on this website.

If you're interested in seeing more of Jacob Lawrence's work, you might consider visiting the Whitney, which has a nice collection of his works.

This video, created by the Manifold Greatness curators of this exhibition, details the influences the King James Bible has had on literary works.

This exhibition was created by a partnership of the Bodleian library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Harry Ransom Center. Their website, Manifold Greatness, is a wealth of information about this exhibition.

If you find the presence of Jewish artist Marc Chagall's work in this exhibition, you'll want to read about how the artis was influenced by Christian forms in this post by viz. blogger Marjorie Foley.

Writing for the Harry Ransom Center, Richard W. Oram and Ryan Hildebrand discuss the intersections of modernism and the Bible.

What do Bob Marley, R. Crumb, and The Book of Eli have in common? That's right, the Bible! Read more here.

In this video, you'll learn all about printing errors in early versions of the King James Bible.

The creators of Manifold Greatness have digitized a number of images from the first edition of the King James Bible. You can explore those images here.

Through reading this post by viz. blogger Lisa Gulessarian, you'll learn all about François-Louis Schmied’s engravings of the Creation and Ruth stories and the Art Deco and Orientalist influences on his work.

You can see an online collection of François-Louis Schmied’s works here.

In this post, viz. blogger Jay Voss explains how the title page of the King James Bible page relates to King James’s succession to the English throne and his creation of the Union Jack

In this video, Dr. Daniel Wallace, an expert on New Testament Greek, explain the difference between the King James Bible and modern translations.

In this post, including Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, viz. blogger Ty Alyea examines the theme of wandering in Christian works.

Form, Function, and Fonts: Eric Gill’s Branding Type

Picture of Eric Gill's Four Gospels; the book is opened to Luke 2; the letters are illustrated with three shepherds coming to pay tribute to the baby Jesus

Image Credit: The Library of Congress

Eric Gill’s illustrated 1931 The Four Gospels of the Lord Jesus Christ According to the Authorized Version of King James I may be the most beautiful text in the Harry Ransom Center’s King James Bible exhibition.  Gill, who was a graphic designer, a sculptor, and a firm Catholic, melded his minimalist design aesthetics with Catholic art’s gilded tradition to make what the Library of Congress calls “a modern homage to the tradition of illuminated text.”  Gill’s black and white figures, however, dance around the elegant typeface to create a Catholicism aesthetically rebranded for the twentieth century: sparse but still striking.

(Slightly NSFW after the break.)

The Composition of Popular Romance: Gone with the Wind's Storyboards

Storyboards from the fire sequence in the movie Gone with the Wind, as displayed on the Harry Ransom Center's windows

Image Credit: Rachel Schneider

After a crash of cymbals, the bright brass instruments build to a climax until the violins enter: so begins “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 Pulitzer-prize winning novel was a legitimate phenomenon before the movie, but the 1939 film is an artistic achievement on its own merits. Gone with the Wind was one of the first movies chosen for preservation by the National Film Registry in part because of its rich history. Gone with the Wind not only holds the record for the highest box office ever (when adjusted for inflation), but also held the rest for most Academy Awards (10) until 1960. Numerous books and documentaries recount the tangled history of the film’s production, which was plagued with cast battles, multiple directors, expensive delays, screenplay revisions, and a battle with the Hays Office to preserve an infamous final line. Much of the material for this work comes from the Harry Ransom Center’s extensive David O. Selznick Collection, which contains not only the producer’s numerous papers but also various production materials from his films.

Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal: Musings on Contradictions with the Harry Ransom Center’s Etched Window Façade

Baudelaire Les Fleurs du mal cover: snake entwined around a bouquet

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Two images related to one of the most respected French poets of the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire, grace the Harry Ransom Center’s etched glass façade. Yes, the images of a disturbingly beautiful flower bud and a similarly ominous bouquet on the cover for Baudelaire’s 1857’s collection of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal, are on the Ransom Center’s south and north windows because the Center has holdings of Baudelaire’s work in their French Literature collection. But, maybe the Ransom Center’s choice to use Baudelaire twice when there are many other French authors they could have chosen to represent leads us to another reason why Baudelaire is so prominently represented in the Center’s public face. Baudelaire has always been a dialectical figure of contradiction—twentieth-century literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin found in Baudelaire the linchpin around which he could situate the conundrum of urbanity in the nineteenth century. In Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project (compiled between 1927-1940), Benjamin muses that the “uninterrupted resonance which Les Fleurs du mal has found up through the present day is linked to a certain aspect of the urban scene, one that came to light only with the city’s entry into poetry. It is the aspect least of all expected. What makes itself felt through the evocation of Paris in Baudelaire’s verse is the infirmity and decrepitude of a great city.” The contradictions of the metropolis—the high and the low, the beautiful and the grotesque—are everywhere in Les Fleurs du mal. Like Benjamin, the Ransom Center uses Baudelaire in their window façade as one figure through which we can view the many contradictions of visual representation and archival work.

Wandering Christians and Illustration in the Biblical Tradition

David and Bathsheba poster

Image Credit: Posters 555

All those who wander are not lost—in fact, wandering is sometimes the point. I did a little of this while touring the Harry Ransom Center’s new exhibit on The King James Bible: Its History and Influences. I particularly enjoyed examining the numerous visuals on display: exquisite Jacob Lawrence and William Blake illustrations, colorful posters for The Ten Commandments and David and Bathsheba, and patterns for Robert DeNiro’s Biblical tattoos in Cape Fear

A Window in Time: Eadweard Muybridge's "Horse in Motion"

Student walking by Horse in Motion

Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center Photo by Anthony Maddaloni

Near the sorth-eastern quadrant of the Harry Ransom Center is a series of images of a jockey throttling a racehorse: Eadweard Muybridge's "Horse in Motion." While these images may seem inconspicuous juxtaposed to Dorothea Lange's eminently recognizable photographs, their ability to bear witness to a horse's motion was both evidence of an event and a monumental event in itself. The product of two men's obsessions, "Horse in Motion" is both a fascinating example of a visual argument and a foundational episode in the history of motion pictures.

Marc Chagall's Exodus: Another Visit to the Harry Ransom Center's King James Bible Exhibition

Exodus Frontispece

Image Credit: Marc Chagall via Spaightwood Galleries

It's a bit surprising to walk into the Harry Ransom Center's current exhibition on the King James Bible and see Marc Chagall's Exodus series on display, but, considering his origins in a Hasidic family, the Jewish artist's works are a surprising addition to any gallery. Chagall's work was an uncomfortable subject for his parents and, later, his in-laws--telling your Hasidic parents that you're going to grow up to be a painter is a bit like telling religious Christian parents that you're going to be a stripper. Despite shocking his parents by painting nudes, Chagall would continue his work to become the foremost Jewish artist of the 20th century, earning respect from his contemporaries for his understanding of color and his ability to use a limited palette with eye-popping results.

An Art Deco King James in the Orientalist Vein: François-Louis Schmied’s Engravings of the Creation and Ruth Stories

Schmied Creation Two-Page Spread: French on one Side, Animals on the Other

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Just before viz. took a break for spring, we visited the Harry Ransom Center’s newest exhibition, The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. Instead of finding only illuminated manuscripts, we were surprised to find contemporary art, literary manuscripts, film posters, and even a sculpture of a golden calf. The exhibition is not just a collection of well-preserved historic Bibles—it’s a unique collection of visual artifacts tangentially related to the King James Bible. As the viz. team walked around the exhibition, one grouping of images caught my eye. Art Deco engraver François-Louis Schmied’s artwork to accompany a French translation of both Genesis and The Book of Ruth from the King James Bible is absolutely stunning. The artwork is most interesting for its fusion of the geometric lines of Art Deco with the Orientalism of its creator and the lyricism of the Biblical stories it illustrates.

Eating the Golden Calf

Stone statue of the Golden Calf

Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center

Eric Gill’s Calf is currently on display at the Harry Ransom Center as part of their new exhibition The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. The calf first appears in the King James Bible in the following verses. “Make us gods, which shall go before us... And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me...And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt (Exodus 32:1-4). In both the statue and in this chapter of Exodus we can begin to consider the relationship between these humans and gods and animals.

The first page of the New Testament in the King James Bible

KJB New Testament Title Page

Two weeks ago I posted on the title page of the 1611 edition of the King James Bible. This week, I thought it’d be fun to consider the first page of the New Testament in that same edition. [Click here for a large-sized image of the page.] This first page of the New Testament contains as much imagery as the edition’s actual title page, which is surprising given that it comes nearly 4/5’s of the way through the book. And though I am no expert in seventeenth-century bibliography, it does seem a little bit odd that such a detailed woodcut would come in the middle of a book, but perhaps this was commonplace for bibles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In any event, there’s a lot going on in this image, and I thought you might find it enjoyable to take a moment this week and consider the page.

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