Les Très Riches Heures de Mrs Mole: A Real-Life Ronald Searle Love Story

What a tender true love story has to do with medieval illuminated manuscripts and experimental medicine.

On New Year’s Eve 1969, Monica Searle was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer. Experimental at the time, chemotherapy — the course of action Monica’s doctor recommended — was a leap of faith. After each treatment, her husband, beloved British cartoonist Ronald Searle, made Monica a Mrs. Mole drawing “to cheer every dreaded chemotherapy session and evoke the blissful future ahead.” The Mole idea came after the couple discovered a large cellar in the decrepit house they had just bought in the south of France.

Les Très Riches Heures de Mrs Mole (public library) gathers 47 of these jewel-like drawings, full of love and light and glowing colors. The title of the book plays off the 15th-century illuminated manuscript Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. Never intended for publication, these intimate visual vignettes exude contagious optimism and hope, a kind of earnestness completely and exuberantly devoid of Searle’s signature sardonic style.

Everything about them had to be romantic and perfect. I drew them originally for no one’s eyes except Mo’s, so she would look at them propped up against her bedside lamp and think: “When I’m better, everything will be beautiful.” ~ Ronald Searle

This is love.

Monica died in 2011, some forty years after her cancer diagnosis, and Ronald joined his beloved a few months later, at the age of 91.

via Austin Kleon HT @kirstinbutler

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The Voyagers: A Short Film About How Carl Sagan Fell in Love

A thousand billion years of love, or what the vastness of space has to do with eternal mixtapes.

In 1977, NASA launched two unmanned missions into space, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Though originally intended to study Saturn and Jupiter over the course of two years, the probes have long outlasted and outtraveled their purpose and destination, on course to exit the solar system this month. Attached to each Voyager is a gold-plated record, known as The Golden Record — an epic compilation of images and sounds from Earth encrypted into binary code, the ultimate mixtape of humanity. Engineers predict it will last a billion years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Golden Record was conceived by the great Carl Sagan and was inspired by his childhood visit to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where he witnessed the famous burial of the Westinghouse time capsule. And while its story is fairly well-known, few realize it’s actually a most magical love story — the story of Carl Sagan and Annie Druyan, the creative director on the Golden Record project, with whom Sagan spent the rest of his life.

The Voyagers is a beautiful short film by video artist and filmmaker Penny Lane, made of remixed public domain footage — a living testament to the creative capacity of remix culture — using the story of the legendary interstellar journey and the Golden Record to tell a bigger, beautiful story about love and the gift of chance. Lane takes the Golden Record, “a Valentine dedicated to the tiny chance that in some distant time and place we might make contact,” and translates it into a Valentine to her own “fellow traveler,” all the while paying profound homage to Sagan’s spirit and legacy.

Carl and I knew we were the beneficiaries of chance, that pure chance could be so kind that we could find one another in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. We knew that every moment should be cherished as the precious and unlikely coincidence that it was.” ~ Annie Druyan

How sublime it is to lose oneself in the poetry of Lane’s closing words:

It’s hard to imagine the Golden Record being made now. I wish Carl Sagan were here to say, ‘You know what? A thousand billion years is a really long time. Nobody can know what will happen. Why not try? Why not reach for something amazing?’ There is no way to forestall what can’t be fathomed, no way to guess what hurts we’re trying to protect ourselves from. We have to know in order to love, we have to risk everything, we have to open ourselves up to contact — even with the possibility of disaster.”

via Short of the Week; HT MetaFilter

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Artist Terry Border Imagines Everyday Objects in Romantic and Risqué Scenarios

Spooning spoons, boogieing sushi, and what bent wire has to do with the mechanism of love.

Remember artist Terry Border of Bent Objects fame, who explores the secret life of everyday objects in playful vignettes using simple bent wire? Border is back with Bent Object of My Affection: The Twists and Turns of Love — a charming collection of new 60 bent-wire vignettes, photographed by in which household objects explore the romantic and the risqué. Sweet and kooky, Border’s images are also a light-hearted metaphor for love itself, wherein the ordinary becomes extraordinary. And though Border’s overly punny captions fall flat for me, the images themselves exude enough delight to make it all a treat.

Love is Free - You make my world go round

I Like it When We Spoon - We fit so well together

Love is Sticky - French kissing

Undercover - I love your appeal

Falling - I'll hold on, no matter what

Marilyn Merinque - You're the wind beneath my wings, and the breeze beneath my skirt

King Leer - I only have dies for you

A Toast To Us!

Film Strip - I think this could develop into something

We Make a Perfect Pair - Straight from the garden of Eden

Magnetic Personality - I can't help this attraction

Misfortune Cookie - I'd never get over you

Shrunken and Wrinkled - Let's grow old together

HT @matthiasrascher; images courtesy of Terry Border / Rex Features via The Telegraph

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My Faraway One: The Passionate Love Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz

How to woo like an artist, or what the overuse of the dash has to do with finding the most generous muse.

There is something relentlessly alluring about unearthing the private letters of luminaries — young Hemingway’s missives, the illustrated correspondence of beloved artist Edward Gorey, cultural icons’ letters to their 16-year-old selves, letters to children by 1970s luminaries on the love of books. But make them love letters, and we’re on a whole different level of mesmerism. Such is the case of My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz (public library | IndieBound), the product of an ambitious digitization project by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, a fine addition to these 7 favorite digitization projects in the humanities.

This exceptional volume gathers 650 meticulously selected and annotated letters exchanged between one of the most prominent couples in art history, photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and legendary artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), who over the course of their 30-year romance exchanged more than 5,000 letters — roughly 25,000 pages — on everything from the rich detail of their daily lives to the breathless angels and demons of their passion.

Culled by editor Sarah Greenough, these missives — sometimes sweet (“Dearest Duck”), sometimes steamy (“the sensuousness of you touching the sensuousness of me”), always profoundly heartfelt (“I love you, Dearest One, if I am capable of love”) — reveal a rare glimpse of the tender humanity behind the cultural icons and, along the way, offer a richer understanding of their creative process as artists.

Photograph of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz kissing at Lake George, 1929

Letter from Georgia O'Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz on letterhead 'Los Gallos, Taos New Mexico,' May 14, 1929

From one of O’Keefe’s spicy letters, which seem to somehow mirror the fluid, light urgency of her floral paintings:

Dearest — my body is simply crazy with wanting you — If you don’t come tomorrow — I don’t see how I can wait for you — I wonder if your body wants mine the way mine wants yours — the kisses — the hotness — the wetness — all melting together — the being held so tight that it hurts — the strangle and the struggle.

And from Stieglitz, as O’Keeffe became his photographic muse:

— How I wanted to photograph you — the hands — the mouth — & eyes — & the enveloped in black body — the touch of white — & the throat —

(As a compulsive dasher myself — sometimes to a painful degree — I found their excessive use of dashes both comforting and charming.)

Letters from Stieglitz to O'Keeffe, November 2-4, 1916

Letters from Stieglitz to O'Keeffe, November 8-10, 1916

How much we have in common. — Traits. — Both turn everything we touch into something really living — & amusing — for ourselves. — Both can laugh — really laugh — even at our heartaches… 300 years you want to live!! — I wish I could give you that as a gift —

Perhaps most poetic of all is that the couple’s romance, captured in the 600 stirring pages of My Faraway One, embodies those highest ideals of being not merely lovers but also each other’s finest muses, greatest fans and most constructive critics — which makes it as much an invaluable piece of art history as it is a personal yet universal fragment of human aspiration.

Images courtesy of Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library // HT ArtInfo

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