This minimal CD cover is my design for Aerial, the debut album from 2562, aka Dutch musician Dave Huismans. This is another release on the Tectonic label who released Underwater Dancehall, the Pinch album I designed last year. As with that release the photos on Aerial are by Liz Eve. This is a really excellent [...]
More horror…. It’s been a while since I posted anything work-related here, not because I haven’t been busy but because much of the work this year is still waiting to see the light of day as a result of protracted schedules. The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics is an anthology from Running Press (US) [...]
Among the legions of Poe adaptations for film and television, IMDB lists 21 versions of The Tell-Tale Heart. The UPA version from 1953 is a rare moment of seriousness from a company more well-known for its Mr Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing cartoons. This has long been one of my favourite Poe adaptations, not least for [...]
The year of rebellion: If… not when | Lindsay Anderson’s If… forty years on.
The Archer & Saint Sebastian by Lubomir Tomaszewski. Saint Sebastian is an exhibition of new interpretations of the image of the pierced saint currently running at the CFM Gallery, New York, in association with JKK Fine Arts, “the Gallery of Modern Symbolism”. The show runs from May 9th to June 8th, 2008, and among the [...]
Marko is a Slovenian in London who takes his own delectable photos. This series and others can be seen here. Via Kaiserin magazine.
The Fencing Team by Bruce Sargeant. Artists in the 20th century used to be multifarious in their activities, often taking their work through different stages or periods of evolution; Picasso and Max Ernst are two good examples of this. In today’s inflated art market this is no longer a wise move. As Brian Eno has [...]
left: Small Hercules Beetle Vase, Large Harlequin Beetle Vase. right: Small Lady Beetle Vase, Large Scarab Beetle Vase. Ceramic art by Laura Zindel. Good to see that arthropods are no longer such a taboo for home furnishings. Via Fabulon. Previously on { feuilleton } • The art of Jo Whaley • Endangered insects postage stamps [...]
Voice of the people | The indefatigable Gore Vidal.
Classic animated short from 1979 which is funny and creepy in equal measure. Harpya won the Palme d’Or for best short film at Cannes that year and in its own small way could be seen as continuing the Belgian taste for Symbolism and Surrealism. Previously on { feuilleton } • Bruges-la-Morte • Short films by [...]
left: Absolutely Free by Theo van den Boogaard (1967). right: Blowin’ Your Mind by Willem de Ridder (1967). A couple of samples from similar work scattered around a Dutch auction site, along with more familiar designs from the San Francisco and London artists. All the Dutch examples are new to me; the dominance of the [...]
Harmonia somewhere in the 1970s: Michael Rother, Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius. Continuing the occasional { feuilleton } series exploring the byways of musical culture, this month it’s the turn of German group Cluster, prompted by their current US tour. News of their re-emergence sent me back to the albums and I’ve been listening to little [...]
Youth and Roman bust (1949). A breathtaking photograph by Herbert List I hadn’t seen before. The model was the Swiss painter Rolf Duerig. Miss Magnolia Thunderpussy’s exemplary Flickr pages have a set of List’s elegant and occasionally erotic photos. Previously on { feuilleton } • Vintage/Vantage • Herbert List’s Beautiful Young Men • Herbert List
Thanatos I & II (1898). The Symbolist movement in painting found adherents across Europe but the western Europeans have always been the ones who receive the most attention for their work. Jacek Malczewski was a Polish artist who produced a number of paintings which can be classed as Symbolist—the usual complement of angels and chimeras—even [...]
Sam and ensemble. “Bedroom Community, possibly the best label in the world right now” was my earnest declaration back in March after seeing Sam Amidon play for the first time. A few months earlier I’d put Valgeir Sigurðsson‘s Ekvílibríum album on my best of 2007 list for Arthur magazine. Tonight’s event at Trinity Church confirmed [...]
From the Hollywood Gothic series (1984). Jeff VanderMeer has a great post about artist/illustrator Ian Miller at io9 which prompts me to write a few words about his work myself, something I’ve intended for a while. Miller is indelibly linked for me with HP Lovecraft on account of his covers for the Panther Horror editions [...]
A little bit country, a little bit rock’n’roll | Mighty rearranger Robert Plant.
Above: Ottoman calligraphy from a selection at the Library of Congress. Below: contemporary Arabic typography from the Experimental Typography Flickr pool. Previously on { feuilleton } • Ghubar • Calligraphy by Mouneer Al-Shaárani • The Journal of Ottoman Calligraphy • Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East
Brian Eno: The professor of rock | Eno at 60.
Pygar the angel, Barbarella (1968). John Phillip Law, who died on Tuesday, was featured here last year in a look at Mario Bava’s crazy live action fumetti, Danger Diabolik (below). Law made that film the same year as he played a blind angel in an equally crazy slab of Sixties’ decadence, Barbarella. In a more [...]
A photograph attributed to William von Gloeden which borrows the Flandrin pose as the photographer did with greater precision in his picture entitled Cain, included in the first post in this series. If there’s scepticism about the origin it’s only that many photographs attributed to von Gloeden are by his cousin Wilhelm von Plueschow. Wikimedia [...]
Retroactive I (1964). My youthful enthusiasm for art acquainted me with the name of Robert Rauschenberg (who died two days ago) earlier than most. Surrealism and Pop Art held an appeal that was immediate, if rather superficially appreciated at the time, and it was seeing works from both those movements which were the most memorable [...]
Colette. Work this week designing a CD of readings from Colette had me searching books for pictures of the author. Of the few I found this is the most interesting, one of several Colette portraits made by photographer Leopold Reutlinger and one of at least two from 1907 which Colette used to promote her Moulin [...]
A Kipling-esque jungle tale by Walter de la Mare with Sidney Sime-esque illustrations by Dorothy Lathrop (1891–1980). The Three Mulla-mulgars was published in 1919 and is another book which can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Inevitably (and conveniently), Golden Age Comic Book Stories has two pages of Ms Lathrop’s work including a number of [...]
The Triumph of the Genius of Destruction (1878). A Hungarian artist with a flair for the pandemoniac, as can be seen from this lurid anti-war painting. Zichy is also known today for Love, a series of erotic etchings produced in the 1870s. These may or may not include the masturbating male at the end of [...]
Controlled chaos | Jon Savage on Ian Curtis’s literary influences.
Penguin is really coming up with the goods these days, living up to their reputation as a house with high standards of cover design, unlike Picador and the shabby way they treated Cormac McCarthy recently. Ian Fleming’s Bond novels are the latest to receive a makeover with some fabulous art from illustrator Michael Gillette. 2008 [...]
Victorian erotica: the original cheeky girls | Porn for Telegraph readers.
Paris and Brussels are well-known centres of Art Nouveau architecture, less well-known but equally valuable is the Latvian capital of Riga whose historic centre is now a World Heritage Site. The highly distinctive building at Elizabetes Iela 10b is one of a number of buildings there designed by Mikhail Eisenstein, father of film director Sergei [...]
Untitled photo print. A fantastic exhibition of photographs, drawings and engravings by Raymond Carrance, aka Czanara, opens today at Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art, New York, running until June 21, 2008. For those of us who can’t get to see it there’s a selection of the works on show at their site which immediately increases [...]
Nation Time still strikes a chord | Alan McGee on free jazz and Joe McPhee.
Metamorphosis by Bridget Riley (1964). Mademoiselle ad (1965). From this Flickr set. Thanks to Aristan for the tip. Hallucinations: Psychedelic Pop Nuggets From The WEA Vaults (2004). Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The album covers archive Previously on { feuilleton } • Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery • Design as [...]
My long and rambling post about the work of Barney Bubbles in January 2007 generated a considerable flurry of renewed interest in the great designer and ended by saying “We’re overdue a decent book-length examination of his work and his influence.” Just over a year later, here we are…. Paul Gorman was one of the [...]
Untitled (Crowd 1) (1993). Like Atta Kim, Alexey Titarenko makes use of time-lapse and/or multiple exposure in his photographs. Of the two I prefer Titarenko’s work, not least because of his moody and spectral evocations of the streets of Havana and St Petersburg. His blurring of human figures takes on a sinister cast with the [...]
Painter, illustrator and novelist Leonor Fini has been mentioned here before in a post about women Surrealist artists but her wonderful paintings deserve renewed attention. There’s an official site and galleries here (follow the links at the bottom of the page) and here but her work is so profuse and varied there could easily stand [...]
Remarkable steam-powered engines by glass artist Bandhu Scott Dunham. The one above is based on 19th century designs. Others are Dunham’s own developments which include contraptions to move glass marbles up and down a series of corkscrew paths. Still pictures don’t do these things justice, best to look at two short QT movies here and [...]
God only knows | Nico Muhly on music and religion.
Photos by Konrad Helbig (1917–1986) from his Ragazzi portraits of Sicilian boys covering the period 1950–1969. A book collection of these appeared from Edition Braus a few years ago but now seems to be out of print. Previously on { feuilleton } • Les Demi Dieux revisited • Les Demi Dieux • California boys by [...]
left: Aeolian Harp; right: Wind Flute. The Wire has a selection of Max Eastley-related materials among the web exclusives on its site. As well as a photo gallery showing many of his musical instrument/artworks there’s a couple of video clips including part of Simon Reynell’s 1989 film, Clocks of the Midnight Hours. (Title borrowed from [...]
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