{ feuilleton }

No, not a post about a new psychedelic band but two body-oriented artworks in the news.

The giant skeleton by Gino De Dominicis is on display in the Palazzo Reale in Milan. More pictures at the Wooster Collective and also here. Via Towleroad.

Cosimo Cavallaro’s My Sweet Lord is due to go on display at Manhattan’s Lab [...]

Hawkwind: They’re still feeling mean
No love, no peace.

Jungle Tales of Tarzan by Burne Hogarth (Watson-Guptill, 1976).

Premonition (Sony Pictures, 2007).
And multiple works by Salvador Dalí…
Previously on { feuilleton }
• L’Amour Fou: Surrealism and Design
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters

A random Flickr discovery.

Why an ebook reader won’t displace books.
Charlie Stross explains. Via.

Do Wah Nanny by Exuma (Kama Sutra LP, 1971).
I came down on a lightning bolt
Nine months in my Mama’s belly.
When I was born, the midwife scream and shout,
I had fire crystals coming out of my mouth.
I’m Exuma, I’m the Obeah Man!

So you’ve listened to Dr John’s Gris-Gris over and over and become addicted to its [...]

I am an artist. Now the pictures are not made by artists. They are made by companies and produced by multinationals. The art in the picture is lost. Now when artists make pictures, they make them for museums. But museums, for me, are cemeteries.
Alejandro Jodorowsky.
More from the About-Bleeding-Time Dept. (emphasis on “bleeding” in this case). [...]

Cadeau Audace by Man Ray (1921).

L’amour fou
Fur teacups, wheelbarrow chairs, lip-shaped sofas … the fashion, furniture and jewellery created by the Surrealists were useless, unique, decadent and, above all, very sexy.
Robert Hughes
The Guardian, Saturday March 24th, 2007
THE VICTORIA AND Albert’s big show for this year, Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, is—well, maybe we don’t much [...]

Debating the Big Wow.
Orch OR or “the quantum soul”. Fascinating stuff.

Pamela Franklin, Deborah Kerr and Martin Stephens: The Innocents (1961).
Freddie Francis, who died last week, was a great cinematographer, and (although he may not have wanted to be remembered for it) a not-so-great director of low budget horror films. His photography on Sons and Lovers (1960) and Glory (1989) won him Academy Awards, and [...]

Pornokrates (1878).
After Mr Peacay’s comments regarding Félicien Rops I thought it time to devote a post to this impious artist.
Rops, a Belgian working in Paris, is curious even by the standards of the disparate group who comprised the Symbolists and with whom he had some connections. Whereas many artists of the time might hint at [...]

Karen Dalton: The best singer you’ve never heard of.

Orphée aux points by Jean Cocteau (1950).
An exhibition of Cocteau drawings from the collection of
Dominique Bert opens today at the Louvre des Antiquaires, Paris.
Jean Cocteau (1899–1963): Collection privée de Dominique Bert
23rd March–22nd April 2007
Le Louvre des Antiquaires
2, Place du Palais Royal
75001 PARIS
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fantômas
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau

The evil of weblog comment spam
The plague in all its graphic glory.

Flickr set of (rare?) photos from a gay New York studio of the Fifties and Sixties.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• California boys by Mel Roberts

Latest book purchase is this large format volume from 1972, one of a number of interesting art books produced by Academy Editions in the early seventies. I also have their monographs on Odilon Redon, “insane” painter Richard Dadd, and their collection of Félicien Rops‘ pornographic and “Satanist” drawings which remains one of the few Rops [...]

Vernal Equinox by Jon Hassell; the perfect listening
for the “momentous poem among moments”.

A substantial Robert Crumb exhibition opened this week at the
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
YBCA salutes local treasure R. Crumb with an eclectic exhibit of early work, collaborations old and new, and the world premiere of his “spool” drawings. Universally acknowledged as the founder of the underground comic scene, Crumb gained cult popularity [...]

Four years of war in Iraq.
And counting…

How to make a cup of coffee even more delightful? Turn it into a work of art, which is what latte artists do. This Dutch site is devoted to the discipline, with two galleries of pictures and details of the annual Latte Art Championships. Among the better links is this Flickr gallery of examples.

The Mindscape of Alan Moore, Shadowsnake Films (2007).

The Adventures of Little Lou, Savoy Books (2007).
Two very different works approaching fruition this month. The Alan Moore DVD I’ve been working on since November but the release date is finally approaching so I’ve added the artwork to the relevant pages on this site.
The Adventures of Little Lou [...]

Star-Spangled Schlemiel.
Captain America: all too human.

Artists see the bigger picture.
No surprise there.

Camilla Akrans borrows some Thirties’ style for the New York Times.

Horst Torso by George Hoyningen-Huene (1931).
“Horst” was Horst P Horst, Hoyningen-Huene’s lover at the
time and later a respected fashion photographer for Vogue.

Divers by George Hoyningen-Huene (1930).

Fashion shoot by Camilla Akrans for the New York Times, March 2007.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The [...]

Great abstract animation from the Trollbäck design company for Moonlight in Glory, a track from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno & David Byrne. Via Design Observer.
In a similar vein there’s Bruce Connor’s 1981 film for another track, Mea Culpa. Connor also produced a film for America is Waiting from the [...]

Seven pages more at the Opera Gallery and another page here.
Via Boing Boing.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Still in pursuit of a Cormac McCarthy obsession I picked up a copy of the (American) Vintage International paperback of Blood Meridian this week, almost solely for the cover. As it turns out it’s also an easier book to read than the UK edition, less tightly bound although the body text in both looks as [...]

It’s all over for homophobia.
“When gay-bashing is the preserve of mealy-mouthed euphemism, its death knell has sounded,” says Zoe Williams. We can but hope. See this earlier story for further details.

XII Festival de Almagro (1989).

Dura el Tránsito (1981).
José Hernández Spanish painter and engraver.
Update: José Hernandez at Velly.org.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
• The etching and engraving archive

More obscure art, only now we’re talking really obscure. This remarkable picture, The Hermaphrodite-Angel of Peladan by Czanara, turned up in the archives of Russ Kick’s seemingly abandoned Rare Erotica blog. “Czanara” was one Raymond Carrance (1921–?), a gay artist who I haven’t come across before and who seems to be completely absent not only [...]

The bestsellers that readers don’t finish.
Unpickupable.

We had Sartorio’s Gorgon and the Heroes yesterday so here’s some Medusas to continue the theme. Art history, especially in the nineteenth century, is full of Medusa portraits; these are some of the better ones.

Medusa by Caravaggio (1598-1599).

Head of Medusa by Peter Paul Rubens (1617).

Oddest Book Title of the Year shortlist announced.
Seaweed, Shopping Carts and the Spoon Boxes of Daghestan.

Giulio Artistide Sartorio is generally counted as one of the Italian Symbolists, along with painters such as Giovanni Segantini. He’s also one of the few notable artists of the period to have worked as a film director.
I’ve been fascinated by the curiously erotic academic style of Sartorio’s early work for years but these paintings rarely [...]

Google’s book plans.
“We are talking about a universal digital library.”

No title (1969).
Robert Rauschenberg–Transfer Drawings of the 1960s
Jonathan O’Hara Gallery
41 East 57th Street, Suite 1302, New York, NY 10022
February 8th–March 17th 2007
The transfer technique, which he took up in 1958, had remarkably few moving parts. It involved soaking newspaper or magazine clippings in solvent, laying them face down on drawing paper and then [...]

Andreas and Paulo photographed by John Andresen.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Youssef Nabil
• Images of Nijinsky
• The art of Hubert Stowitts, 1892–1953
• John Andresen

Origins of Heterosexuality.
What makes people heterosexual? “It just feels natural,” they claim.

…Fantômas was championed by the Parisian avant-garde, first by the young poets gathered around Guillaume Apollinaire, who, together with Max Jacob, founded a Société des Amis de Fantômas in 1913, and later by the surrealists. In July 1914, in the literary review Mercure de France, Apollinaire declared the imaginary richness of Fantômas unparalleled. The same [...]

Alan McGee misses Arthur magazine.