Arts in the Archives

12-01-2026

We celebrate, anniversary by anniversary, all the amazing art in our archives: music, film, literature, paintings, and more - if you would like to contribute by flagging up an anniversary coming up in 2026, please let us know via email at [email protected]


Table of anniversaries:

David Bowie (died 10 Jan 2016)

Agatha Christie (died 12 Jan 1976)

Alexander Korda (died 23 Jan 1956)

Georges Lautner (born 24 Jan 1926)

E. T. A. Hoffmann (born 24 Jan 1776)

Giuseppe Verdi (died 27 Jan 1901)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (born 27 Jan 1756)

Release of "Mélinmontant" (Jan 1926)

Clark Gable (born 1 Feb 1901)

Mary Shelley (died 1 Feb 1851)

Iannis Xenakis (died 4 Feb 2001)

Constantin Brâncuși (born 19 Feb 1876)

Release of the first Hot Five Sessions (1925-1926)

Dario Fo (born 24 Mar 1926)

Max Ernst (died 1 Apr 1976, born 2 Apr 1891)

Happy Birthday Sir David Attenborough! (born 8 May 1926)

Miles Davis (born 16 May 1926)

Marilyn Monroe (born 1 June 1926)

George Sand (died 8 June 1876)






David Bowie (10th anniversary of his death)

Singer, songwriter, but also an important actor, David Bowie is arguably one of the most influential figure in pop culture of the 20th century, not only in music, but for cinema, theatre, fashion, etc. There is quite a large collection of material about David Bowie in APE (you can access it here), but like for all real stars, his influence continues to produce documents trail well past his death: this is a photograph from the archives of the prestigious F+F School for Art and Media Design Zurich, which had an art installation dedicated to Bowie in 2018.





Agatha Christie (50th anniversary of her death)

Agatha Christie, arguably the queen of the whodunnit genre, wrote 66 detective novels, 14 short stories collections, and 33 theatrical piece, 20 of whom original, the other adapted from her novels. To these days, she is the most translated author ever, her characters and stories resonating with virtually any culture in the world. Here is a pic from one of her play, "And Then There Were None”, put into production at the Die Insel Theatre in Germany in 1977 (please note, the original caption uses the original title from 1939, which quoted a traditional English minstrel from 1869 - not unrepeatable for good reasons).






Alexander Korda (70th anniversary of his death)

Sir Alexander (Alex) Korda was one of the founding fathers of modern cinema.Born Sándor László Kellner in 1893, in Hungary, Korda began his career in the European silent film industry before working in Hollywood and eventually establishing himself as a central force in British filmmaking from the 1930s onward. He founded London Films and later owned British Lion Films, playing a decisive role in building a commercially viable and internationally respected British film industry. Korda produced and directed several landmark films, including "The Private Life of Henry VIII", "Rembrandt", and "The Third Man", which combined high production values with international appeal. His importance lies not only in his artistic achievements but also in his role as a film entrepreneur who helped transform British cinema into a global competitor; in recognition of this contribution, he became the first filmmaker to be knighted, in 1942. You can find much more about him in our archives, at this link; here is the Portuguese poster of his last movie as a director, the first adaptation of Oscar Wilde's "An ideal husband", which enjoyed international success despite being at the centre of a boycott in Hollywood, organised by the radical right-wing group "Sons of Liberty", that boycotted British movies, officially, in protest of the British policies in the Palestine Mandate, considered a hindrance to the establishment of the State of Israel; although Korda believed the boycott was in large part due to the distribution quotas imposed by Britain on American films, in order to promote British cinema...





Georges Lautner (100th birthday!)

French film director Georges Lautner would have been 100 years old today! A very prolific director, with 46 feature films on his belt in a career that spunned from the 1960s until his death in 2013, Lautner was a key figure in post-war French popular cinema, successfully combining commercial success with a distinctive authorial style, particularly the sharp dialogue,co-written with Michel Audiard,which transformed genre cinema into a vehicle for biting social satire. He directed some of the most iconic French crime and comedy films of the era, notably "Les Tontons flingueurs" (1963), which has become a cult classic. By blending violence, irony, and dark humour, he helped European cinema move from strict realism toward a more stylised and ironic form.







E. T. A. Hoffmann (250th birthday!)

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was a German Romantic author of fantasy and gothic horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, and artist, creating some of the first examples of both horror literature and crime fiction. His works became more famous through other media, notably the novella "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King", which everyone knows as "The Nutcracker" ballet. You can see the trail of archival documents left by E.T.A. Hoffmann in his career here, amongst which this portrait of his by fellow artist and writer, who lived one century later, A.W.M.C. Ver Huell, held at the Gelders Archief

Hoffmann is still an important source of inspirations to artists in the present: we are honoured to host filmmaker Matteo Bernardini's latest animated work, a short animated phantasmagoria inspired by what he considers Hoffmann ’s masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr. To create this tribute, Bernardini drew inspiration from Hoffmann’s own sketches and doodles, preserved in the historic collections of the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.






Giuseppe Verdi (125th anniversary of his death)

Arguably one of the most famous composer of all time, Giuseppe Verdi wrote many of those opera pieces that are still an important part of pop music today, such as Aida or La Traviata. His music was also strongly charged with political connotations, becoming a part of the process of Italian unification. APE hosts almost 900 collections on him, from 15 different countries, with documentation as new as from 2020 related to him - you can dive here

The poster for "Un giorno di regno" at the State Opera in Wrocław, by artist Jan Lenica,1960s





Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (290th Birthday!)

The first child prodigy, the first cursed artist, and the first rock star, the enduring legacy of Mozart needs no justification. In his short life (he died at 35 years of age), he composed 22 operas, 41 symphonies (not including the unfinished ones), 50 concertos, 70 sonatas for chamber music, plus sacred music, and other pieces for orchestra and solo voices - the first minuet composed when he was only 5. There are more than 5000 collections on Mozart in APE; here you can access the papers for the organisation of the Mozart festival in 1892 (and still a yearly event) , and here is the French poster for the bicentenary of his birth






100th anniversary of the release of "Mélinmontant"

Ménilmontant, directed by French-Russian director Dimitri Kirsanoff (you can see all the archival collections about him here), remains one of the most powerful and distinctive works of silent cinema, and it continues to resonate with audiences a century later, for the way it redefined cinema at the time: it is a landmark of French avant-garde cinema. Despite being a silent film, it uses almost no intertitles, relying instead on editing, camera movement, and close-ups to convey emotion and meaning. Furthermore, women are the protagonists in this film, at a time when women in cinema were relegated to secondary roles. Although it was not widely successful upon release, Ménilmontant has since become a canonical work in film history. You can check it for yourself, as it is now fully available on Youtube:






Clark Gable (125th Birthday!)

Clark Gable defined Hollywood stardom in the 20th century, shaping new ideas of masculinity, celebrity, and the power of cinema as mass culture the was after all the male star in what is still the highest grossing film of all time, "Gone with the wind". Here is the Portuguese poster for "Ambição do Oiro", or "Call of the wild", from 1935






Mary Shelley (175th anniversary of her death)

Mary Shelley, born in London in 1797, is one of the most important figures in modern literary history. She reshaped the relationship between science, imagination, and ethics, particularly thanks to her novel "Frankenstein", which created one of the most iconic, classic, and famous tropes of horror imagery - and it is regarded as one (if not the) foundational text of science fiction - there are more than 3000 collections about Frankenstein in Archives Portal Europe, against 83 collections about Shelley; still, her name was not obscured by her creature, remaining also one of the most beloved, and known, writers of all time. Here you can see the film censorship licence for the very first (of 460) Frankenstein film adaptation, from Edison Studios, in 1910 :





Iannis Xenakis (25th anniversary of his death)

Iannis Xenakis was a Romanian-born, Greek-French avant-gardecomposer, music theorist, architect, performance director, and engineer. Working mostly in France, he redefined music by bringing mathematics, architecture, and computation into composition. He rejected traditional musical structures in favour of stochastic processes, probability theory, and formal logic, creating works that treated sound as a physical and spatial phenomenon. His compositions, expanded the boundaries of contemporary music and influenced electronic, experimental, and algorithmic composition. By bridging science and art, Xenakis helped shape a new conception of modern music as an interdisciplinary and technological practice. As an architect, he is most famous for designing the Philips Pavilion in Brussels, together with Le Corbusier, but he also participated in the bid for the design of the Cité de la musique in Paris, which was eventually awarded to architect Christian de Portzamparc - here you can see Xenakis' application and drawings:





Happy 150th Birthday to Constantin Brâncuși

The "patriarch of modern sculpture", Romanian-born Constantin Brâncuși revolutionized 20th-century plastic arts by moving away from realism to seek the "essence" of things through radical simplification and abstraction. His technique was based on carving directly into the material(mostly stone, wood, and marble) unlike most of his contemporaries, who worked on clay models for others to cast. Brâncuși on the contrary emphasised the fundamental "confrontation" that must occur between the artist and his material.

Brâncuși lived and worked across most of Europe and the United States, and his influence is truly global; here are papercuts on him from the Archivo Histórico Nacional, and the images from a 1976 personal exhibition in Paris, at the Musée de Luxembourg - you can find many collection on him in APE





The Hot Five Sessions

The Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven Sessions are some of the most influential jazz compositions of all times. Muskat Ramble in particular, recorded for the first time on the 26th February 1926, became Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five's most frequently recorded piece. Louis Armstrong is truly the epithome of the universal appeal of music. The quintessential Black American artist, he was influenced by European traditions through 19th-century French cornet techniques, opera, as well as popular song, which he synthesized with blues and African-American idioms. In spite of the censorship against foreign culture, America, and the highly racist doctrine, even Fascist Italy embraced Louis Armstrong, who was Italianised as Luigi Braccioforte, and toured regularly in Italy and Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. After the war his popularity exploded - here is the newsreel of Armstrong's visit to Switzerland in 1955, playing together with children at the Zurich airport:

And the reel of his goodbye to Europe after his 1962:





Happy 100th Birthday to Dario Fo !

Arguably the most important contemporary Italian playwright, Dario Fo was also an actor, director, and political satirist.

He widely regarded as one of the most important figures of modern European theatre mostly because of his genuinely popular approach, that was the contrary of anti-intellectualism, but that made high arts and high culture accessible to ordinary people. In his career spanning more than six decades, he revived the tradition of popular theatre, using comedy as a powerful tool of political critique.

Fo became famous internationally for his sharp, humorous, and highly political plays, often performed in collaboration with his wife, actress and writer Franca Rame. His best-known work, Mistero Buffo (1969), used popular storytelling, improvisation, and dialect to criticize the Church, political power, and social injustice.

He was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature for works that, in the words of the Nobel Committee, “emulate the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the oppressed.”

His influence on political theatre and satire remains strong today.

You can find the collections on Dario Fo in APE, from eight countries, here





Max Ernst (50th anniversary of his death)

Max Ernst was arguably one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century, revolutionising both techniques in visual arts, and the content of art. A fundamental figure of Dada, he invented methods like frottage (rubbing textures to create images), grattage (scraping layers of paint off a canvas to reveal textures and patterns underneath), and he pioneered collage in painting. He also explored dreams, the unconscious, and irrational imagery, central to Surrealism. Still, Ernst lived through the tragedies of the 20th Century. Born in Brühl, south of Cologne (Germany) on the 2nd April 1891, he served in World War I, an event that left profound scars in his psyche. He then moved to France to follow his career; but he was arrested and interned by the French police in 1939 because, as a German citizen; he was now an enemy. Following the German invasion of France, he was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo, but managed to escape to the US, where he remained until the 1950s, when he returned to France. He died one day before his 85th birthday. There are more than a 1000 results in Archives Portal Europe on Max Ernst: this is an article by feminist, art critic, and Spanish Civil War combatant Margarita Nelken, who in 1966 dedicated an article dedicated to Ernst on the magazine "Excélsior", under the title “Presence of Max Ernst". You can read it here, thanks to the Archivo Histórico Nacional

Max Ernst: “The Man at the Edge of the Forest”





Happy Birthday Sir David Attenborough

Sir David Attenborough, arguably the most important natural science communicator alive, turn 100 on this day. An artist and a writer too, he left in his life so far an important trail of documents related to his work, preserved in some of the most important science and university archives in Europe; he is one of the most important figure in the history of nature documentaries, shaping and making popular an entire genre. Before his work for the BBC, wildlife films were relatively static and educational in a narrow sense: animals were shown almost like scientific specimens.

He transformed the genre into a cinematic and emotionally engaging genre, while preserving all its educational and informative qualities. Through landmark series such as Life on Earth and Planet Earth, he introduced large-scale storytelling that connected animal behaviour, evolution, ecosystems, and human history into coherent narratives accessible to mass audiences. His narration style combined scientific accuracy with clarity and emotional warmth, helping millions of viewers engage with complex ideas in biology, ecology, and conservation. At the same time, he moved wildlife filmmaking away from older colonial and “hunter-explorer” perspectives toward a more respectful and ecological understanding of nature.

Attenborough also revolutionised the technical and visual dimensions of the genre, by promoting the use of innovative filming technologies such as aerial photography, macro cinematography, underwater cameras, infrared imaging, and high-definition production: nature documentaries became visually spectacular global productions, capable of showing behaviours and environments never previously seen on screen.

Here is a picture of him in 1962, as the Head of the BBC Travel and Exploration Unit:





Miles Davis (100th Birthday!)

Miles Davis transformed jazz multiple times over nearly five decades. Few musicians have had such a sustained influence on both the sound of a genre and the careers of other artists. He played a leading role in shaping cool jazz, modal jazz, and jazz fusion, and his 1959 album Kind of Blue, regarded as one of the greatest jazz recordings ever made, revolutionised improvisation and helped bring jazz to a broader audience. Everyone knows Miles Davis, as well as the many talents he discovered along the way, such as John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, and Wayne Shorter. A real pop star in this sense, he constantly reinvented his music, embracing new influences as music, and the world, evolved with him. "For me, music and life are all about style" he famously stated, and in his case, it has never been more true.

Here he is at the 1st edition of the International Jazz Festival of Cascais (Portugal), now one of the most important music festivals in Europe, in 1971 - his performance took place during a particularly innovative period of his career, shortly after the release of "Bitches Brew", which marked one of the most influential developments in contemporary music: the emergence of jazz fusion. Pics courtesy of the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo; you can access many more documents about Miles Davis in Archives Portal Europe here






Happy 100th Birthday Marilyn Monroe!

Another very special anniversary, as 1926 would have marked the 100th birthday of Marilyn Monroe, the original, and incomparable, Bombshell. A century after her birth, Marilyn remains one of the most recognisable faces in the world—not simply because of her timeless beauty, but because of the joy, charisma, and humanity she brought to the screen.

Too often remembered only as a glamorous icon, Marilyn was also an extremely talented actress, a fantastic singer and comedian, and a woman who worked tirelessly to shape her own career at a time when opportunities for women in Hollywood were limited. Through films such as Some Like It Hot, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and The Seven Year Itch, she created performances that remain as entertaining and vibrant today as when they first appeared. Many Hollywood actors become stars for a while; she remains a perpetual icon, immortalised in thousands of historical archives - have a look at the APE collections here






George Sand (150th anniversary of her death)

Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, better known as George Sand, was one of the most important writers of her generation, as well as one of the most prolific: in addition to her 70 published novels, she has more than 50 volumes of tales, plays, political texts, and varia to her credit.

Her choice to wear male attire, which may appear extremely scandalous now, was not as uncommon at the time: since 1800, four years before she was born, the police in Paris had issued a “transvestite pass” to which women could apply to wear male clothing; health, occupational, or recreational reasons were all considered valid justifications. Mme Dupin obtained her with the justification of male attire being less expensive, sturdier and more comfortable. Furthermore, male clothes gave her the opportunity to walk more freely in Paris, and to obtain access to venues that barred women. Instead, she caused great scandal for her outspoken feminism, the choice of a male pseudonym, and perhaps most of all for smoking tobacco in public as a woman.

However, these habits did not obfuscate her talent as a writer: she was more renowned as an author than Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac in many areas in Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, and she is still universally recognised as one of the most important exponents of Romanticism. You can find more than 880 archival collections on Sand here; like this portrait from the Archives Nationales de France,

or her correspondence with Constantin Pecqueur, one of the most respected economists of his time, from the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis:


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  • A national archive holds the records of a country's administrative bodies, i.e. from ministries and other public bodies, sometimes also private papers of former ministers, chancellors, or presidents.
  • A private person or family archive holds the records forming the legacy of a prominent person or family.
  • A regional archive holds the records of a region's administrative bodies.
  • A specialised governmental archive holds records of public bodies, often operating on a national level, that are not part of the national archives' holdings.
  • A specialised non-governmental archive or archive of another cultural heritage institution hold collections from various cultural heritage institutions, eg. museum archives, libraries archives, etc
  • A university archive or archive of another research organisation holds the records pertaining to the administration of the according educational or research body.
  • Political parties, popular/labour movements and other non-governmental organisations, associations, agencies and foundations hold the archival collections of these institutions, outside of governmental records and outside of business archives (e.g., NGOs)

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This object is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons - Attribution, ShareAlike (BY-SA) licence. You can copy, redistribute, remix, tweak and build upon the licensed object, even for commercial purposes, as long as you attribute the rights holder as described in the licence, and you license your adaptations of the object under the same terms.

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This object is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons - Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence. You can copy, redistribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the licensed object for non-commercial use only, as long as you attribute the rights holder as described in the licence, and as long as you license your adaptations of the object under the same terms.

This object is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons - Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivates (BY-NC-ND) licence. You can copy and redistribute the object for non-commercial use only, as long as no alteration is made to the object and as long as you attribute the rights holder as described in the licence.

If you remix, transform or build upon the object, you may not distribute the modified material.

This object is in the public domain, but has been digitised as the outcome of a public-private partnership, where the terms of the contractual agreement limit commercial use for a certain period of time. You can copy, redistribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the object for non-commercial use only.

This object has been identified as an Orphan Work in the country of first publication and in line with the requirements of the national law implementing Directive 2012/28/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2012 on certain permitted uses of orphan works.

You are free to use this object in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. Please note that you are responsible for your own use, including the need to obtain other permissions e.g. with regard to publicity, privacy or moral rights.

This object is in the public domain, but is subject to known legal restrictions other than copyright which prevent its free re-use. Please contact the providing institution for more information.

This object is currently in copyright. Please contact the providing institution for more information and in order to acquire additional permissions for re-use.

The copyright status of this object has not been evaluated yet. Please contact the providing institution for more information.

You are free to use this object in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. Please note that you are responsible for your own use, including the need to obtain other permissions e.g. with regard to publicity, privacy, or moral rights.

This object is currently in copyright and the rights holder(s) have allowed re-use for educational purposes only. You are free to use this object in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. Please note that you are responsible for your own use, including the need to obtain other permissions e.g. with regard to publicity, privacy or moral rights.

Please contact the providing institution for more information and in order to acquire additional permissions for any other uses.

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