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The Bayeux Tapestry Is 70 Metres Long and Was Probably Made by English Nuns
The Bayeux Tapestry is approximately seventy metres long and fifty centimetres tall. It is not a tapestry. A tapestry is woven; the Bayeux work is embroidered, with woollen yarn worked onto a linen cloth in eight different colours. It tells the story of the 1066 Norman Conquest of England in fifty-eight scenes, with a Latin inscription running above the figures throughout. It is the most extensive piece of pictorial narrative art surviving from the eleventh century. The cloth has hung in various locations for nearly nine hundred years. It was almost certainly made within ten years of the events it depicts. It survived the French Revolution (when it was nearly cut up to cover a baggage wagon), the Napoleonic Wars (when Napoleon ordered it brought to Paris for examination), and the German occupation of France (when the Nazis nearly shipped it to Germany before the Allied advance forced them to abandon the plan). It now hangs in a purpose-built museum in Bayeux, Normandy, where it has been since 1983. Who Made It The cloth was almost certainly made in England, not in Normandy. The evidence is technical and stylistic. The embroidery uses techniques (laid-and-couched work, stem stitch, split stitch) that were specialties of Anglo-Saxon embroidery workshops. The same techniques are documented in surviving fragments of English ecclesiastical embroidery from the same period. The Latin inscriptions use spellings characteristic of Anglo-Saxon Latin (such as "Eduardus" rather than the Norman "Edouardus") and include English place-names spelled in Anglo-Saxon orthography. Several scenes show details (the death of Edward the Confessor, the building of the ships) that match contemporary English accounts more closely than the Norman accounts. The workshop where the cloth was made was probably attached to one of the great Anglo-Saxon monastic houses. Canterbury, with St Augustine's Abbey and Christ Church Cathedral, is the most likely candidate. Both had active embroidery workshops in the late eleventh century. The Canterbury hypothesis is supported by the close stylistic relationship between the tapestry's figures and the figures in surviving Canterbury manuscripts of the same period. Who Commissioned It The patron was almost certainly Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. Odo was the half-brother of William the Conqueror and one of the central figures in the Norman conquest of England. He fought at Hastings, was made Earl of Kent by William, and held vast English estates from 1066 onward. He was also the political patron of his cathedral at Bayeux, where the tapestry was eventually housed. The case for Odo is circumstantial but strong. He had the resources to commission a work of this scale (an estimated 100,000 hours of embroidery labour). He had the political reason to celebrate the conquest. He had access to English workshops through his Kent earldom. And the tapestry's narrative gives Odo himself an unusually prominent role: he appears in three scenes, including one where he leads the Norman knights into battle at Hastings. What It Shows The narrative runs in fifty-eight scenes from left to right, with the Latin inscription above. The story begins with King Edward the Confessor in Westminster sending Harold Godwinson to Normandy in 1064. Harold sails across the Channel, is captured by Count Guy of Ponthieu, is ransomed by William of Normandy, fights alongside William in a Breton campaign, and (in a scene whose interpretation is still disputed) swears an oath on holy relics to support William's claim to the English throne. Harold then returns to England. King Edward dies in January 1066. Harold is crowned the next day. A comet appears (the work shows Halley's Comet, which actually appeared over England in April 1066). News reaches Normandy. William begins building ships. The Norman fleet sails. The army lands at Pevensey. The Battle of Hastings begins. The battle scenes (over half the surviving cloth) show the Norman cavalry charging the Anglo-Saxon shield-wall, the fighting at close range, and (at the end) the death of King Harold. The famous arrow-in-the-eye scene is here, though it has been recently re-interpreted: the arrow may not be hitting the eye, and the figure shown being hit by an arrow may not be Harold at all but a different soldier. The labelled "Harold" appears to be a slightly different figure, falling under the swords of mounted knights. Bayeux Tapestry, scenes 32-33: Halley's Comet appears over England in April 1066, watched by frightened Anglo-Saxons. The embroiderers have caught the comet in mid-flight, with the tail trailing across the linen cloth. What Is Missing The surviving cloth ends after the battle. The original almost certainly continued for several more scenes: the rout of the Anglo-Saxon survivors, the Norman march toward London, the coronation of William at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066. These scenes survive in summary form in the Latin chronicles of the conquest, but the embroidered version of them has been lost. The current end of the cloth is frayed and torn; some scholars estimate that as much as three metres of the original has been lost. The end may have been lost relatively early. The earliest surviving copy of the cloth (a 1729 antiquarian drawing) already shows the same ending we have today. The Lower Border Above and below the main narrative band, the cloth carries decorative borders of small animals, fantastical beasts, and (in places) small figural scenes. The upper border is mostly decorative. The lower border, particularly in the battle scenes, shows dead soldiers, looters stripping the dead, and severed limbs. The borders comment on the main action: while the inscribed narrative shows the dignified violence of the cavalry charge, the border shows the same violence at ground level, with corpses and looters. The borders also include several scenes that have been interpreted as moral commentary on the action. A fable of the fox and the crow appears in the border near the beginning, possibly suggesting that the diplomatic exchanges between Harold and William involved trickery on both sides. A scene of Aesop's wolf and lamb appears at a similarly sensitive moment. Why It Survived The tapestry was kept at Bayeux Cathedral from at least the twelfth century onward. It was displayed annually during the Feast of the Relics. It survived the cathedral fires of 1106 and 1142, possibly because it was stored in a separate building. It survived the French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, when the cathedral was sacked but the tapestry was hidden by clerics. The closest the cloth came to destruction was during the French Revolution in 1792. A group of French national guards came to the cathedral to seize cloth for covering ammunition wagons. The tapestry was about to be cut up when a local lawyer, Lambert Léonard-Leforestier, intervened, arguing that the cloth was of antiquarian importance and should be preserved. The guards relented. Napoleon had the tapestry brought to Paris in 1803, where it was exhibited at the Louvre as part of the propaganda campaign for his planned (and then abandoned) invasion of England. It was returned to Bayeux in 1804 and kept in the cathedral until 1842, when it was moved to a public museum. The Museum The current display building, opened in 1983, contains the tapestry in a long curved corridor with controlled lighting and humidity. The cloth is mounted behind glass under low light to slow further fading. The Latin inscription has been provided in translation panels. Audio guides are available in twelve languages. The museum draws approximately 400,000 visitors a year. The cloth's planned move to a temporary display in the British Museum, announced and then postponed several times, has been a recurring point of Anglo-French cultural discussion since the 2018 visit of President Macron to London. The cloth, made in England and exhibited in France for nine hundred years, would return to England for the first time. As of 2026, the move remains under discussion but is not scheduled. The seventy metres of embroidered linen continue to do what they were made to do nearly a millennium ago: tell the story of a single year that changed the political, linguistic, and cultural history of England, with a narrative clarity that no later medium has equalled.
Salomon Painted 769 Gouaches Before Being Sent to Auschwitz at Twenty-Six
Charlotte Salomon was born in Berlin in 1917 to a wealthy Jewish family. Her mother, Franziska, killed herself when Charlotte was nine, by jumping from a window. Charlotte was told that her mother had died of influenza. The truth about the suicide, and about the long history of suicides in the maternal line of Charlotte's family, was kept from her until she was twenty-three. She was then told everything in a single afternoon by her grandfather, who was about to commit suicide himself. Between 1940 and 1942, in the small French Mediterranean town of Villefranche-sur-Mer where she had fled with her grandparents, Salomon painted 769 gouaches on individual sheets of paper. The gouaches were numbered, arranged into a sequence, and given titles. The whole work, which Salomon called Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?), tells the story of her life and family up to the moment of her grandfather's revelation. She finished it in the spring of 1942. She gave the work to a French doctor for safekeeping. She was deported to Auschwitz in October 1943 and killed on arrival. She was twenty-six and five months pregnant. Berlin Salomon's father, Albert, was a surgeon and a respected academic in Berlin. After the death of his first wife, he married a singer named Paula Lindberg. Paula effectively became Charlotte's mother and stepmother, and Charlotte's relationship with her was both close and competitive. Charlotte attended the Vereinigte Staatsschulen, the Berlin united state art schools, from 1936 to 1938. She was the only Jewish student admitted in 1936, and she was admitted only by an administrative oversight: her application had not been flagged as Jewish, and by the time the school realised, she had already enrolled. She studied painting and won the school's prize for best student in 1938. She was barred from accepting the prize in person because of her race. By 1938 the family situation in Berlin had become impossible. Charlotte's grandparents had fled to the south of France in 1933. After Kristallnacht (November 1938), Albert and Paula sent Charlotte to join her grandparents in the south of France. She left Berlin on 1 January 1939 and never saw her father or stepmother again. Both survived the war; both returned to Berlin afterwards. The Suicides The history that Charlotte's grandfather revealed to her in 1940 was as follows. Her mother Franziska had committed suicide in 1926. Her aunt Charlotte (Charlotte's namesake) had committed suicide in 1913. Her grandmother had attempted suicide several times. Several other women in the family across three generations had killed themselves. The pattern was being kept secret from Charlotte because the family worried she would conclude that the same fate awaited her. The grandfather told her the whole history because he had decided to kill himself. He had become depressed in the south of France, was certain the Nazis would eventually reach Villefranche, and could not bear waiting. He intended to die that evening. He wanted Charlotte to understand the family she came from. The grandfather did kill himself that night. Charlotte spent the next eighteen months in the south of France, with her grandmother (who soon died of cancer) and increasingly alone. The whole of Leben? oder Theater? was conceived and painted in this period. What She Painted The work is 769 individual gouache sheets, approximately 32 by 25 centimetres each, painted in tempera. They are numbered in pencil at the top right. They are designed to be read in sequence: as a kind of graphic novel before graphic novels existed, or a film told entirely in painted frames. The narrative tells the story of Salomon's family from the late nineteenth century onward, focused on the women: the suicides, the marriages, the relocations, the secrets. Salomon used fictional names for everyone, but the figures are recognisable. Her mother is called Franziska. Her stepmother is called Paulinka. The grandfather is called Daberlohn (a play on "Tagelöhner," day-labourer). Charlotte herself is called Charlotte Kann. The technique is unusual. Salomon used a limited palette: yellow, red, blue, black, white, with small variations. The figures are simplified, almost cartoonish, but the compositions are sophisticated. The earlier sheets show single scenes; the later sheets layer multiple scenes onto a single sheet, with text written across them and figures repeating across the surface. The whole work moves from a relatively conventional narrative style at the beginning to an increasingly fluid, almost cinematic visual language by the end. Salomon wrote text directly onto the gouaches: descriptions, dialogue, musical references (she indicated specific songs from operas, popular music, and German lieder that she wanted to accompany the reading of each section). The intended experience of the work is multi-sensory: image, text, and music all simultaneously. Charlotte Salomon, photograph, c. 1939–40. Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam. The End Salomon married Alexander Nagler, a refugee from Vienna, in June 1943. The couple were living in Nice. By this point southern France had been occupied by Nazi Germany, and the round-up of Jews was systematic. On 24 September 1943, Salomon and Nagler were arrested by the Gestapo at their home. They were transferred first to Drancy, the holding camp outside Paris, and then deported to Auschwitz on 7 October 1943. Charlotte Salomon was killed in the gas chamber on arrival at Auschwitz on 10 October 1943. She was twenty-six and five months pregnant. Alexander Nagler was killed in Auschwitz on 1 January 1944. What Survived Before the arrest, Salomon had given the complete Leben? oder Theater? to the French doctor Georges Moridis, who had been treating her family in Villefranche. She told him, "This is my whole life." He kept the work hidden through the rest of the war. After the liberation, Moridis returned the work to Salomon's father Albert, who had survived in Amsterdam. Albert and his wife eventually donated the entire 769-sheet work, plus Salomon's letters and surviving smaller drawings, to the Joods Historisch Museum (Jewish Historical Museum) in Amsterdam in 1971. The work has been held there since. What Took So Long Salomon's work was not widely known until the 1960s. The first major publication was a 1962 selection in a German art journal. The first full exhibition (with all 769 sheets shown together) was at the Joods Historisch Museum in 1981. The work has slowly entered the canon since. The reception has been complicated by two questions. The first is whether Salomon's grandfather assaulted her sexually before his death; a 1990 letter from Salomon, written in 1943, claims that he did. The letter was kept private by the family for decades and was published only in 2015. The second question is what to make of Salomon's work as a Holocaust testimony: she completed it before her deportation, before the full scale of the Final Solution was clear, and the work does not address the Holocaust directly. It is a record of a German Jewish family's pre-Holocaust history, made by a woman about to be killed by the Holocaust. The 2017 Royal Academy exhibition Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre? (London) was the largest international showing of the work. The 2023 Centre Pompidou-Metz retrospective, which combined the gouaches with photographic and archival material, brought new audiences. Salomon is now considered one of the central figures in the early-twentieth-century narrative tradition that anticipates the modern graphic novel. What the Work Argues The title Leben? oder Theater? is a question. Is what Salomon shows life, or is it theatre? Both, the work suggests. The family history is true; the way she has rendered it (with theatrical staging, song cues, cinematic framing) is invented. The truth of the work is in the structure she has imposed on the chaos: the decision to look at her own family's pattern of suicide and ask what it meant for her own future. The 769 sheets are an attempt by a twenty-three-year-old painter to understand her own life by painting it. The painter died at twenty-six. The work continues. The Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam allows visitors to examine the sheets one by one, in the sequence Salomon numbered them. The whole work takes approximately three hours to read.
Kusama Has Lived in a Tokyo Psychiatric Hospital by Choice for Fifty Years
In 1977, Yayoi Kusama, then forty-eight, checked herself voluntarily into the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo. She had returned to Japan from New York four years earlier, exhausted, in debt, and suffering from the same hallucinations and obsessive thoughts that had been part of her life since she was about ten years old. The hospital admitted her as an outpatient with the option to remain in residence for as long as she found it helpful. She found it helpful. She has remained in residence since. Her studio is across the street from the hospital. She walks to it most mornings. She has produced, since 1977, hundreds of paintings, large-scale installations, a series of Infinity Mirror Rooms that have travelled to most major museums in the world, several novels, an autobiography, and a flagship gallery installation at the Whitney Museum that broke the Whitney's attendance records when it travelled to New York in 2021. She is, by sales figures, the highest-earning living woman artist in the world. Matsumoto Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, a small city in central Japan. Her family ran a wholesale seedling and plant nursery, and her childhood was financially comfortable. It was not emotionally stable. Her mother was abusive toward her. Her father was repeatedly unfaithful and frequently absent. Kusama's mother used her, from about the age of five, as a kind of spy on the father's affairs. The hallucinations began when she was about ten. She would later describe seeing the surfaces of objects around her dissolve into patterns of small dots, or into nets of intersecting lines. The dots would expand and consume the room. The nets would surround her body. She would lose track of where she ended and the room began. The experience was frightening but also visually intense. She began drawing the patterns. The early drawings (preserved in her foundation's archive in Matsumoto) are obsessive accumulations of small marks: dots, circles, and intersecting curves filling entire sheets of paper, with the drawn figure half-emerging from the pattern. The drawings were her way of containing the hallucinations by giving them an external form. Tokyo and Then New York Kusama trained at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in the late 1940s, studied traditional Japanese nihonga painting, and exhibited her first works in Tokyo in the early 1950s. The Japanese art world of the period was deeply conservative, dominated by an elder establishment with no interest in the kind of obsessive abstract drawing she was making. She decided to leave. She wrote, in 1955, to Georgia O'Keeffe, sending her several drawings and asking for advice. O'Keeffe, then in her late sixties and living in New Mexico, wrote back: she encouraged Kusama to come to America. In 1957, Kusama arrived in Seattle. By 1958 she was in New York, in a Lower Manhattan loft, painting the first of the Infinity Net series. The Infinity Nets were large white-on-white canvases covered with thousands of small painted curved marks. Each canvas might have 50,000 individual brush-strokes. Kusama painted them in sessions of fifteen to eighteen hours, without breaks. Several of the canvases were eight or nine metres across. Critics in New York noticed. By 1961, Kusama was exhibiting alongside Donald Judd and Frank Stella. By 1963, she was producing Accumulation sculptures (everyday objects covered in stuffed-fabric protrusions) and the first of the mirror-and-light environments that would become her signature. Yayoi Kusama, The Obliteration Room (installation view). Visitors over the course of the installation cover the all-white room with thousands of coloured stickers, gradually obliterating its surfaces — the principle Kusama has been working with for sixty years. The Sixties Kusama spent the 1960s in New York at the centre of an avant-garde scene that included Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, and Joseph Cornell. She had relationships with several of them: a long platonic friendship with Cornell, a romantic relationship with a sculptor whose name she has not publicly disclosed. She organised what she called Happenings: nude performances in public places (Wall Street, Central Park, the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art) where performers covered their bodies and the surrounding objects with painted polka dots. The performances were political (anti-Vietnam, anti-capitalist, sexually liberationist) and produced large quantities of photo and film documentation. The Happenings made her famous in New York and disreputable in Japan. The Japanese press covered the New York performances with shock and disgust. Her family in Matsumoto stopped speaking to her. She had become, in the eyes of conservative 1960s Japan, a national embarrassment. The Collapse By 1973 the pace of work and the New York scene had broken her. The hallucinations had returned in force. She was deep in debt. She had been hospitalised several times in the late 1960s after suicide attempts. She made the decision to return to Japan. The return to Japan was difficult. She was nearly fifty, with no money, no Japanese reputation, and a family that did not want to acknowledge her. She lived in a small flat in Tokyo and tried to write. She produced several novels during this period: deeply obsessive, hallucinatory, and largely ignored by the Japanese literary establishment. In 1977, she checked herself into Seiwa Hospital. The decision was practical: the hospital provided structure, medical supervision, and physical safety. It was also chosen with care. The hospital allowed her to leave during the day to work in a studio. It would not require her to give up her practice. She negotiated the terms of her residence carefully. The Studio Across the Street The studio across the street from the hospital became, over the next four decades, the engine of her late career. She would walk to it every morning at around 9 a.m., work until late afternoon, and return to the hospital for the evening. The schedule has continued, more or less unchanged, for nearly fifty years. The work produced in this period is what built her international reputation. The Infinity Mirror Rooms (which she had begun in New York in 1965 but developed extensively from the 1980s onward) became her signature: small enclosed spaces lined with mirrors, with LED lights or small painted objects inside, creating the impression of an infinite extension of pattern. The room asks the viewer to step inside and stand in the centre. The pattern obliterates the boundaries of the room and the viewer's sense of where they are. The Mirror Rooms map, in physical form, the experience Kusama has had for nearly her entire life. The hallucinations she has fought since she was ten have been turned, over six decades of work, into rooms that other people can step into and feel some version of what she has felt. The art works, in part, because the maker is showing the audience something she has direct access to. The Recognition The international rediscovery began in earnest in the early 1990s. A series of museum exhibitions (the Museum of Modern Art in 1989, the Venice Biennale in 1993, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1998) made the case for Kusama as a foundational figure in postwar art. The 2012 retrospective at Tate Modern brought her to wide European notice. The 2017 Hirshhorn Museum show in Washington broke attendance records. The 2021 New York Botanical Garden installation and the 2022 Tate Modern Infinity Mirror Rooms exhibition together became the most-visited contemporary art events of their years. Kusama, at ninety-three, was the highest-earning living woman artist by sales figure. What the Hospital Allows The decision to live in a psychiatric hospital is unusual for a public figure of Kusama's prominence. Her case is unusual: she has the resources to live anywhere in the world, but she has chosen the hospital because it provides what she needs for the work to continue. The hospital offers continuity. It offers medical supervision when the hallucinations are severe. It offers a routine that does not change with international demand for her work. It removes from her daily life the pressures (social, financial, logistical) that contributed to her collapse in the 1970s. The studio across the street is the only place that needs her. Kusama is in her mid-nineties. She continues to work. The exhibitions continue. The hospital and the studio are still where her days happen. The hallucinations are still there. The polka dots that began at ten are still being painted.