Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

Francis Bacon painted pictures based mostly on photographs published in encyclopaedias, popular magazines, the tabloid press, posters and packaging. He was interested in reproductions of paintings by great masters. He used photographs by Muybridge. Photographs, treated by Bacon as tools, were later “worked on” by the artist, becoming the canvas for his paintings. The scenes he chose – often drastic, depicting rape and violence – were painted into his canvases, creating a deformed image of the world that “emerged” from the horrors of both world wars. He painted portraits based on his photographs of friends. These were usually people with whom the artist was emotionally connected. He painted self-portraits base on a series of photographs taken in automatic photography, from which he selected several to form the basis of his paintings. Real things and persons should exist in the fictional space assigned to them. By destroying literalism in painting, Bacon wanted to find the similarity desired in painting as its principal, so to rediscover realism. When painting a portrait, he tried to capture the appearance of the figure. After Francis Bacon’s death, his London studio (7, Reece Mews), restored by conservators, was “repeated” in the space of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. It contains about 7,500 objects, among them numerous photographs which had been torn up by the artist, photographs of his lovers and friends, black and white reproductions. The Bacon ‘archive’ collected in Dublin is now a silent hint of the creative process of the artist, who despite numerous studies devoted to him and recorded conversations, still remains one of the most inscrutable artists of the 20th century.

Early 20th-Century Popular American Magazines

The American popular magazine came into being in the 1890s due to advances in marketing, printing, and distribution. These were general interest magazines but they soon splintered into specialty magazine genres, geared at specific audiences or specific interests. In general, magazines are an ecology within the even larger ecologies of print and literary culture. By their very nature they are multivocal and fragmented, singular objects with kaleidoscopic contents. The study of magazines reflects their subject, drawing from many fields and relying upon many critical approaches for a multitude of possible applications. With huge circulations and nationwide distribution, American popular magazines were arguably the first iteration of mass culture. Yet there is a large disjunction between the importance and prevalence of popular magazines of the first half of the 20th century and the amount of critical work devoted to them. One of the central reasons for this disjunction has been the preponderance of scholarly attention paid to literary modernism, which is seen as oppositional to the popular and commercial (an idea that has been more recently revised). Consequentially, studies of small circulation, coterie little magazines vastly outnumber those dedicated to popular periodicals. The study of popular magazines enjoyed an upswing with second-wave feminism. Sociological and literary studies followed which traced the construction of women as passive consumers (of goods, of identity) back to The Ladies Home Journal and forward into contemporary women’s homemaker magazines. The next few decades saw an expansion and complication in the studies of the relationship between audience and magazines, especially as the field of cultural studies gained momentum. Feminist work on imagined reader communities saw popular magazines as potentially empowering and the study of African American Popular Magazines flourished as did the study of how magazines constructed masculinity. In the last twenty years or so, the popular magazines of the first half of the 20th century have frequently become the subject for critical literary scrutiny. This shifting of focus is due in part to the rise of new modernist studies, which has decentralized modernism and largely dispelled the idea that modernism wasn’t available to the masses, along with the rise of modern periodical studies, which has expanded attention beyond little magazines. As a result of these critical practices, middlebrow, genre, and working-class magazines—such as Smart Magazines, Pulp Magazines, and Hollywood Fan Magazines—are emerging as objects of study, spurred by growing digital archives of magazines that were rarely collected in libraries.

Electric light and the visualization of Catholic power in Spain during the Restoration Era (1874–1931)

This article analyses the contested adoption of electric lights by the Spanish Catholic church during the Bourbon Restoration era (1874–1931). Through a careful reading of primary sources, namely Catholic popular magazines, and official documents, it will show how Catholic authorities and practitioners resisted, negotiated and, ultimately, engaged with electricity in religious spaces. The article argues that electric light contributed to wider exchanges in a non-monolithic Spanish Catholicism on the observance of traditional values or the possibilities of the church’s modernization. However, amid a particularly tense moment regarding the secular–clerical relations, the systematic use of electric lights in churches at the turn of the twentieth century—but also in other public ceremonies—contributed to the making of religious sensations aimed at attracting new believers and reasserting the presence of the institution in a disputed public space.

Mathematical Representations in Magazine Advertisements: Have the Messages Changed in a Decade?

Although people's ideas about mathematics and mathematicians often develop from their school and home experiences, such ideas also are influenced by interactions with popular media. In this article, I report on findings from a study in which I analyzed magazine advertisements for representations of mathematics and mathematicians. Data collection took place in two phases, approximately a decade apart. In each phase, I reviewed a year’s worth of issues in each of six diverse, popular magazines for mathematical representations in advertisements. The frequency of mathematical advertisements decreased from Phase 1 to Phase 2, but the initial frequency was already extremely low, indicating mathematics’ invisibility in popular media. This lack of representation may be due to mathematics not being seen as a “cool” way to sell a product or service since mathematics is linked to many negative stereotypes. The representations were similar in the two phases, with mathematics often depicted in stereotypical ways, such as being difficult or stressful. People rarely featured in the mathematical advertisements, which serves to further dehumanize mathematics. Generally, the findings were consistent with those from studies of other popular media, such as movies and books.