{ feuilleton }

‘Father of LSD’ dies aged 102 | Albert Hofmann, RIP.

Tribute to Michael Moorcock | In which the writer achieves Grandmaster status.

The Vision of Faust (1878). A suitably sorcerous bacchanal for Walpurgis Night by the Spanish painter. There’s more of his voluptuous erotica at ArtMagick and The Atheneum. The Witches Sabbath aka Muse of the Night (1880). Previously on { feuilleton } • Weel done, Cutty-sark!

The Art of Illuminating As Practised in Europe from the Earliest Times by WR Symms (1860). From the days when blocking was an art. One of a number of lavish board designs which can be found at Fromoldbooks.org. Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The book covers archive Previously on { feuilleton } • Decorated [...]

It’s not exactly news that Portishead‘s long-awaited third studio album is released today, its arrival having been telegraphed for months. I’ve been a fan since I heard the first theremin-inflected strains of Mysterons back in 1994 so I’d been looking forward to this. After a hiatus of ten years the burden of expectation grows very [...]

Natural wonders | The splendour of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Plasmatic Spree (2006).

Florimond by Jean-Philippe Guillemain.

I was rather aggrieved a few weeks ago when I found a copy of James Whitcomb Riley’s The Flying Islands of the Night (1913) at the Internet Archive. Nice to find a free copy of a rare book but the grievance came as a result of an intention to write something about its illustrator, Franklin [...]

Voyageur IV (1995). Born in Paris in 1941, he confesses to being largely “…self-taught. I was always at the Louvre, staring like crazy at the pictures there, fascinated by ‘how it’s done’.” … (Leonor) Fini’s works from the 60s influenced, to a degree, the young Henricot. Depicted in a hieratic style with underlying geometrical forms, [...]

Nabokov’s last work will not be burned

The Boojum Press edition of the Guide (1997). (Frame supplied by Mark Roberts.) A few days ago we had the CD cover meme which encourages people to create cover designs for invented groups generated by random means. In a similar vein but minus the random element there’s the growing selection of books by reclusive author [...]

One of the great electroacoustic compilations, Electronic Music III: Berio/Druckman/Mimaroglu, Turnabout Records (1967). I’ve spent the past week or so immersed in the world of electroacoustic composition courtesy of torrents provided by the Avant Garde Project. Wikipedia attempts a definition of electroacoustic music and thus saves me the trouble: While all electroacoustic music is made [...]

The ballad of Sandy Denny: Return of the folk queen | Another overdue reappraisal.

Papilio ulysses (2000). Best. Insect Art. Ever. From a series entitled The Theater of Insects, also the name of a book devoted to Ms Whaley’s photographs which will appear from Chronicle Books later this year. The photographs in this book are fantastic field illustrations. While the insects in these images are real, the backgrounds are [...]

The Flandrin pose again, this time in a photograph by George Platt Lynes (1907–1955). This is from a Flickr set of Lynes’ work which was a nice find since many of the web collections are small and tend to repeat the same material. The picture above isn’t from the Flickr set, it’s a scan from [...]

New work by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson is always welcome here and the above is exactly that, a large rotating mirror installed at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, along with other pieces comprising a major survey of his work. Take Your Time a new piece at P.S. 1, made for the show, [...]

Byrne & Eno reuniting | New album of “electronic gospel”.

Okay, here’s a web meme I can really get behind…. I’ve never been tempted to try one of those long list affairs filled with questions such as “what was your favourite breakfast cereal when you were a child?” The CD cover meme is more my kind of thing and it goes like this: 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random [...]

Michigan Central Station. Photos from Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre (above) and Forgotten Detroit (below), the latter being an extensive catalogue of urban dereliction. The station waiting room. Update: Environmental Graffiti today has a post speculating which American cities might be the lost cities of the future. Detroit is number three; go here to see [...]

Nothing to do with the late Arthur Lee, well…not directly anyway. I love the contrast between the dizzying floor design (created with vinyl tape) and the rather dour Corinthian columns in Jim Lambie’s installation. I believe the Flickr photo above shows the work being prepared. Forever Changes, which also includes some of the artist’s playful [...]

Is Goya masterpiece just a colossal mistake? | Panic over El Coloso.

left: In The Belly of Nature (self-portrait) by Rudolph Koppitz (1923). right: Ritti with Rod, North Sea, Germany by Herbert List (1933). Vintage/Vantage is an exhibition of classic homoerotic photography of the 19th and 20th century at Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art, NYC. Examples range from Muybridge’s human locomotion experiments, through von Gloeden‘s Mediterranean boys [...]

Adonis Blue Butterfly. Beautiful stamps for the second in a Royal Mail series intended to bring attention to endangered species. These will be issued on Tuesday and are designed by Andrew Ross using photography from the Natural History Museum. The Independent notes the irony of the Royal Mail printing these even as they’re building a [...]

The Arthur schedule is definitely back on course with a new number following promptly on the heels of the last. The Brothers Mael make the cover of this issue and there’s lots more goodness inside. Go thou here for free downloads or a subscription to the paper version.

Pas de Deux (1968). News of a theatre piece celebrating the creativity of Norman McLaren, the pioneering Scots (and gay) animator and film-maker, had me searching YouTube again for his work. His short film Neighbours (1952) is very well-known, oft-cited and imitated for its pixillated character movement. No surprise to see it there, then, along [...]

Myths of the World (1930). Boris Artzybasheff’s humorous illustrations of anthropomorphic machines have received a lot of attention from Boing Boing recently. But Artzybasheff was a very versatile artist, not a one-trick pony, and his book and other magazine illustration is worth a look as well. These examples are from the indispensable VTS. Some of [...]

There’s calligraphy and then there’s fraktur extravaganzas such as this…. Previously on { feuilleton } • Post one thousand • Ghubar • Calligraphy by Mouneer Al-Shaárani • The Journal of Ottoman Calligraphy • Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East

Valery photographed by Paul Roberts, discovered following some random browsing at deviantART. More of a direct Flandrin pose than some of the entries posted earlier in this series. Valery is a very cute model and there’s lots more photos of him from this session. Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The recurrent pose archive

All Is Vanity by Charles Allan Gilbert (1892). The surreptitious skull is another of those perennial motifs that recur in art from time to time and one which has become especially prevalent since the late 19th century. There seem to be a number of reasons for this, the most obvious being that if you’re going [...]

‘Adults are idiots’ | Laurie Anderson and her new show, Homeland.

Frustration Attraction (2006). A Canadian artist works a marvellous variation on Salomé using oils and photo-printed canvas. Lots of other fine, inventive work at her site, all of it shown far too small to see the considerable detail. A tip to artists with websites: let us see the pictures properly; people appreciate it and will [...]

Klaus Dinger (right) with brother Thomas, circa 1978. From the sleeve of Viva by La Düsseldorf. “There were three great beats in the ’70s: Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s funk and Klaus Dinger’s Neu! beat.” Brian Eno Klaus Dinger, the great drummer for Neu! and La Düsseldorf (and briefly Kraftwerk in 1971) died back in [...]

Atelier Elvira (1897-98). Seeing as there’s been a run of Art Nouveau-related posts here it’s worth mentioning a location that’s familiar to students of the Jugendstil but less well-known to the world at large. August Endell’s Atelier Elvira was a Munich studio building whose exterior decoration of a very stylised dragon creature manages to be [...]

The coins of the realm receive a very welcome makeover following a design competition by the Royal Mint. The winning design by Matthew Dent is a surprisingly contemporary choice for such a staid institution. Although the Royal Arms shield is very traditional, the act of breaking it into pieces across the smaller coins is a [...]

Dean by photographer Chris Summerfield.

Hell scene (2003). Paintings by American artist Inke Essenhigh whose work is currently on exhibition at the Victoria Miro gallery, London. Optimistic Horse And Rider (2002).

Homophobia rife in British society, landmark equality survey finds

Escaping Criticism by Pere Borrell del Caso (1874). A few eye-fooling paintings for All Fools Day.