Design by Bill Gold. With respect to Bonnie and Clyde and my other films, I would have to say that I think violence is a part of the American character. It began with the Western, the frontier. America is a country of people who act out their views in violent ways—there is not a strong [...]
Some recent pieces of Wilde news. The cover above is for a new edition of Teleny and Camille, Jon Macy‘s comic strip adaptation of the erotic novel attributed to Oscar Wilde and members of his Uranian circle: Teleny is the haunted musical genius that everyone desires but no one has truly touched… until the fateful [...]
Cover by Evgeny Lanceray for Prospectus of the Magazine, 1901. Previous posts here have concerned fin de siècle art magazines like The Savoy, Pan and Jugend; yesterday we had Sergei Diaghilev so it seems fitting to mention Diaghilev’s own magazine, Mir Iskusstva (World of Art), founded in 1899 with similar intentions to the European magazines [...]
Ida Rubinstein as Zobeide and Vaslav Nijinsky as the Golden Slave in Schéhérazade (1913) by Georges Barbier. Another great exhibition at the V&A, London, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes gathers a wealth of costumes, stage designs, photographs and ephemera—including some of Stravinsky’s manuscripts—to present a history of the legendary ballet company and their visionary impresario. [...]
One of a series of illustrations by Vera Bock for A Ring and a Riddle (1944) by M.Ilin and E. Segal. Via A Journey Round My Skull. • The Creator of Devotion: Photos from a Vogue Hommes Japan feature by Matthew Stone. And also here. • Dressing For Pleasure: Jonny Trunk gets out the rubber [...]
Judith (no date). Another Decadent type who died young, de Nerée was a Dutch artist and illustrator whose work in these pictures owes a great deal to Aubrey Beardsley. As Beardsley-influenced pieces go they’re rather crude, although it’s unfair to be too judgemental since there’s so little of his work available to see online. Following [...]
The Dance of Salomé (1885) by Robert Fowler. There’s always more to find… Unfortunately, Robert Fowler’s academic tableaux is a prime example of bad Victorian art: carefully modelled but overlit, dull and lifeless. And worst of all for the subject at hand: deeply unerotic. We’re supposed to believe that this woman wrapped in a bedsheet [...]
Yes, it’s the “S” word again, and if there was any doubt that this has been the Year of Steampunk here at Coulthart Towers, look at these recent works. And this is by no means everything I’ve been doing in this area, there’ll be further announcements later on. The covers for KW Jeter’s novels are [...]
Der Eigene, collected edition, 1906. Design credited to Adolf Brand. The subtitle is from an article (see below); Der Eigene, the world’s first homosexual periodical was devoted to an ideal of “masculine culture” which looked to Ancient Greece for a model of same-sex relationships. Adolf Brand (“Editor, photographer, poet, polemicist, activist, anarchist, enfant terrible“) founded [...]
The cyanotype process is a very old photographic printing technique and also the source of the word “blueprint”, after the process became common among builders and engineers for the printing of plans. The technique also has its enthusiasts today, some examples of which can be seen here. These views of the Alhambra Palace in Granada, [...]
This week’s reading has been Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a capricious novel which features in its 18th century scenes encounters with some of the great poets of the era, including Alexander Pope. A number of references are made to Pope’s satiric The Rape of the Lock (1717), one of his most notable works which received an [...]
Did someone say “woody”? Plenty more toy antics at TheOneCam. • And yet more Haeckelisms: Praying in Haeckel’s Garden, recent works by artist Mary O’Malley. • Seasons of the Peacock, the perennial showoff as depicted by a handful of Art Nouveau artists. A couple of examples there I hadn’t seen before. • Dorian Cope presents [...]
The work of French architect and designer René Binet (1866–1911) has been featured here before with one of his most famous creations, the monumental gate he designed for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. Philippe Jullian in his 1974 book about the exposition, The Triumph of Art Nouveau, calls the gate the “Porte Binet” and [...]
I made a post about the various cover designs for Patrick Süskind’s novel, Perfume, shortly after the film had been released in 2007 but haven’t paid much attention to the book since. These recent designs are by Klaus Haapaniemi, a Finnish illustrator based in London, and do a good job of presenting the story’s themes [...]
Tommies Bathing by John Singer Sargent (1918). More discoveries from recent image trawls. There’s been plenty of speculation about the sexuality of John Singer Sargent—see here, for example—and this watercolour depiction of relaxing British soldiers would seem to be another of his works which confirms an enchantment with the male form. Lust aside, it’s a [...]
Much of the work I’ve been doing for the past few weeks has been steampunk-related so I’ve been searching for more antique reference material than usual. A recent delve unearthed this pair of vintage contortionists. The photograph above dates from circa 1880 and is from the George Eastman House collection at Flickr. Also at Flickr [...]
Arriving in the post this week was this 350-page guide to horror cinema, a Carlton Books reprint of the 2006 Andre Deutsch volume to which I contributed some 30-plus reviews and essays on Dracula, Lovecraft and occult cinema. This new printing is slightly expanded although the production is a lot less lavish than the earlier [...]
Well that took a lot longer than it should have done but as I mentioned earlier, the break has enabled me to catch up with some pressing deadlines. Despite the delay the server move seems to have gone better than in the past, and should have the advantage of making this part of the site [...]
The server swap is still ongoing here so, for technical reasons I won’t bore anyone with, I’m taking a short break until things are sorted out. Yesterday’s post and a couple of recent comments may vanish for a while but if they do they should be restored soon after. A break would be useful this [...]
Histioteuthis ruppellii. Suckered pseudopods flex and writhe again this week with simultaneous postings at BibliOdyssey and Sci-Fi-O-Rama. Coincidence or some cephalopodic zeitgeist thing? You decide. BibliOdyssey has a fine set of natural history plates showing various squid and octopuses while Sci-Fi-O-Rama presents a small collection of illustrations by Barnaby Ward. If it’s boys and tentacles [...]
Pasión por Canaletto (2005). Ignacio Goitia is a Spanish artist whose depictions of opulent aristocracy manage to be subversively homoerotic thanks to the addition of figures we can interpret as boyfriends, sex slaves or wish-fulfilling phantasms; Ludwig II would no doubt approve of the sentiment even if he disagreed with some of the decor. Goitia’s [...]
After writing about Charles J Strong’s Book of Designs a couple of days ago, it seems pertinent to point the way to a far more essential Art Nouveau design book which can also be found at the Internet Archive. Combinaisons Ornementales was a collaboration between Maurice Verneuil, George Auriol and Alphonse Mucha published in 1901, [...]
A Folies Bergère dancer, c. 1909. • Six Novels in Woodcuts: The Library of America publishes a boxed set of Lynd Ward’s works: Gods’ Man, Madman’s Drum, Wild Pilgrimage, Prelude to a Million Years, Song Without Words and Vertigo. • RIP ace graphic designer Raymond Hawkey. Related: Raymond Hawkey: An eye for detail, and Hawkey’s James [...]
Another gem from the cornucopia of scanned books at the Internet Archive, Charles J Strong’s Book of Designs was a style guide and motif resource for artists and amateur craftspeople tasked with the creation of advertising show cards or shop display signs. The book was first published by the Detroit School of Lettering in 1910, [...]
It’s been a pleasure this week seeing my 1999 portrait of Cthulhu’s rotting domicile, R’lyeh, used as the cover image for Salon Futura, a new online magazine edited by Cheryl Morgan. Cheryl describes SF as “a new and hopefully somewhat different magazine devoted to the discussion of science fiction, fantasy and other forms of speculative [...]
Do all roads lead to the Internet Archive? Not really but I keep ending up there when I happen to discover an interesting old book and wonder whether they have a PDF of the volume in question. The volume for consideration today, The House of Orchids, is a 1911 collection of verse by George Sterling [...]
Yet more bookplates, discovered whilst browsing the wealth of material at this Japanese site recommended by Andy Paciorek. Belarus artist Yuri Yakovenko’s name is given a number of spellings on various sites so I’ve gone with the one from a Belarus art page since they can be presumed to know best how to label their [...]
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