{ feuilleton }

Following some print links led me once again to the University of Heidelberg and a collection of engravings by Jean Le Pautre (1618–1682), the grandly-titled Oeuvres D’Architecture De Jean Le Pautre, Architecte, Dessinateur & Graveur du Roi (Band 1): Contenant les Frises, Feuillages, Montans ou Pilastres, Grotesques, Moresques, Panneaux, Placarts, Trumeaux, Lambris, Amortissements, Plafonds, & [...]

Pick and mixtape | How cassettes refuse to die.

Callum at Front Free Endpaper sent me this photo a while ago of a page from an old boys’ book after he saw my Men With Snakes post which featured the same statue, Lord Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877). Leighton’s sculpture came to mind again recently following a chance reference to another bronze [...]

Feathers maketh the man, extra points if they’re peacock feathers. I’ve been unable to find a photographer or model credit for this picture, unfortunately (if anyone knows, please leave a comment), but it comes from He Said, He Said via Fabulon. The winged boy below is creditable, however, being one Lyle Lodwick photographed by Tyler [...]

More Exposition Universelle fetishism. Archive.org has a small collection of documents from the Paris exposition, not all of them of interest but these two are worth a look for their pictures at least. Exposition universelle, 1900; 32 vues photographiques (above) features various views of the exposition exhibits although they’re made somewhat redundant by the Brooklyn [...]

The entire run of Britain’s first underground/alternative newspaper. Incredible. IT was never as flashy as Oz but ran for longer and arguably had the better contributors, among them William Burroughs. One notable feature was an avant garde comic strip, The Adventures of Jerry Cornelius, written by Michael Moorcock and M John Harrison with artwork by [...]

The moon shoot: film of Apollo mission on show again after 35 years in the can

A shame I didn’t discover these 360º views of the Jaipur Observatory in January when I posted a series of panoramas from different cities. The structures at Jaipur are one of five extraordinary astronomical observatories built by the Maharajah Jai Singh II in the 18th century. Would be nice to see VR photos of the [...]

The Last Man (1886–1891).
Vedder was one of the principal American Symbolists, possibly the leading one although there wasn’t the same degree of competition in the United States as there was in Europe. Last time I was casting around the web for his work he wasn’t so visible but that’s changed recently with a dedicated website. [...]

My third CD design for the Tectonic label is another piece of relative minimalism which once again features photos by Liz Eve. All the backgrounds on this occasion are microscope close-ups of vinyl records, very fitting for a double-CD collection of recent 12″ releases.
The Tectonic logo (which predates my involvement with the label) is based [...]

Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros.

“The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He [...]

If Paintings Had Voices, Francis Bacon’s Would Shriek | A centenary retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Another charity shop book-raid this week netted me a copy of Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in its 1965 Pan Books edition, one of the Bond series with great covers designed by Richard Hawkey. The sight of the tiny Pan silhouette above reminded me that this logo was based on drawings commissioned from [...]

Cover ups: Storm Thorgerson’s iconic album artwork | From the Hipgnosis days and after.

Jerry (1931).
A few weeks too early for Bloomsday, this painting by Paul Cadmus was in the news this week after being acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art. The subject is Jerry French, one of the artist’s regular models and also his lover during this period. I hadn’t seen this picture before and wonder whether [...]

“For A Definition Of The Nude”.
After yesterday’s post I can’t resist repeating something seen at Fabulon, Thombeau and I both being cock fans (so to speak). Dimitris Yeros is a Greek artist and photographer whose site features a series of studies of male and female nudes juxtaposed with a variety of animals. This isn’t the [...]

La femme au paon (Woman with peacocks): from L’Estampe Moderne (1897).
Two works by British Art Nouveau poster artist and illustrator, Louis Rhead (1858–1926). The first of these is very typical and resembles many of his magazine covers of the period. The cover illustration for The Century, meanwhile, must count as the only time I’ve seen [...]

The good people at Ubuweb have excelled themselves by turning up this 70-minute avant garde work by a director who’d managed to stay resolutely off my radar despite years spent delving for cinematic weirdness. L’Ange (1982) is a film which stands comparison with the more abstracted moments of David Lynch and the Brothers Quay. In [...]

Max (The Birdman) Ernst (1967).
Psychedelia is never far away here at { feuilleton }. Yesterday’s film poster reminded me of this work from the psychedelic era by Martin Sharp, an Australian artist who moved to London and became closely-associated with Oz magazine and London’s other leading psych poster designers, Michael English and Nigel Waymouth, aka [...]

Yet another of those curious Eastern European film posters which, to our Hollywood-colonised eyes, seem to violate all the conventions of cinema marketing. This example is a painting by Josef Vyletal for a 1970 Czech release of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Surrealist art enthusiasts will immediately identify the floating figures as being cut loose from [...]

How the West was written | Dario Argento and his work for Once Upon a Time in the West.

This 1979 Picador edition of The Beckett Trilogy is one of my favourite paperback cover designs. The “illustration” (as it’s described on the back) is a photograph of an artwork by artist/designer Russell Mills and the minimal credit gives no indication as to whether it was Mills who was responsible for the striking type layout. [...]

Scorsese: my friendship with Michael Powell | Marty, Michael and the splendour of The Red Shoes.

An exploration of seminal novelist Italo Calvino, through his writing | Jeanette Winterson on the Italian master.

I’ve had some longer posts planned for a while but the current workload is claiming too much of my attention, hence the increase in picture posts such as this one of model Theo Hall photographed by David Macgillivray. Beautiful Theo was discovered via the essential VGL where many more delightful specimens of male pulchritude may [...]

‘Hallucination’ fish netted in English Channel | Mediterranean Sarpa salpa, said to cause LSD-like effects, turns up off Cornwall.

Or the temptations of Uncle Sam… An editorial cartoon from 1919 by Oliver Herford (1863–1935) showing how the nonsense argument of “X leads to Y” goes back a long way. These imps are more silly than frightening, Herford should have used this as the starting point for a comic strip: Rum Demon and the Narcotics.
Previously [...]

Hard Times Give New Life to Prague’s Golem

Nearly two years after their American release, and not a moment too soon, the films which comprise Kenneth Anger’s superb Magick Lantern Cycle turn up at last in the UK. Good to see these being produced by the BFI, their previous collections of shorts by the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer are distinguished by quality [...]

An architectural rendering by Arthur Beresford Pite (1861–1934) whose proposal for a West End club house after the style of Viollet-le-Duc’s Gothic revivalism induced howls of outrage from the architectural establishment when it won the RIBA’s Soane Medallion in March, 1882. I know this drawing solely from an appearance in Felix Barker & Ralph Hyde’s [...]

The masterpiece that killed George Orwell | The writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Ed Jansen writes to let me know that the latest edition of his web magazine, Passage, is now online. Once again, most of the features listed below are in Dutch but that doesn’t exclude all visitors here. David Britton has been recommending Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones to me so I guess I’ll be reading [...]

left: Safe n Sane; right: Larky.
A pair of paintings by German artist Ralf Paschke whose speciality—if it wasn’t already obvious—is male bondage. I’m fascinated by the single-mindedness at work here, some of the leather close-ups verge on the abstract. Vigorous and unsentimental stuff.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• [...]

Johann Hari: Dear God, stop brainwashing children | Worship is forced on 99 per cent of children without even asking what they think.

Lightning & Kinglyface’s paper forest; photo by Jeff Moore.
Tunnel 228 is a collaboration between Kevin Spacey in his position as artistic director of the Old Vic Theatre, and experimental theatre company Punchdrunk staging an art installation/performance work in tunnels beneath Waterloo, London. Mention of the magic word “Metropolis” (in its Fritz Lang context) caught my [...]

Cormac McCarthy wins lifetime achievement award | The PEN/Saul Bellow award.

The first of the books I’ve been designing for Tachyon Publications appears this month. Two more are due to follow and I’m working on another at the moment; more about those titles later.
The Best of Michael Moorcock was a pleasure to be involved with not only because I’ve been reading Moorcock’s fiction for a very [...]

Or Gramato-graphices. In quo varia scripturae emblemata, belgicis, germanicis, italicis, hispanicis, gallicis characteribus exaata… scripta, aeri incisa, et impressa per Cornelium Boissenium Enchusanum to give the full title. A treatise on penmanship and calligraphy from 1605 by Cornelis Dirckszoon Boissens. Also another free PDF at Archive.org. Searching for better reproductions turned up this stunning engraving [...]

Art historians claim Van Gogh’s ear ‘cut off by Gauguin’

left: Serpentine pattern; right: Bouquet pattern, both 19th c.
Regular readers here will have seen a number of posts recently concerning psychedelic culture, a perennial fascination/obsession of mine. One of the notable qualities of movements such as psychedelia or Surrealism is the way they highlight what seem to be previous manifestations of themselves which, until their [...]