{ feuilleton }

Splendor Solis: Winged (1989). Following from the post earlier this month about the Splendor Solis series of alchemical plates, Thom draws my attention to a contemporary reworking by American artist Laurie Lipton. I seem to recall seeing one of these at Phantasmaphile but didn’t think at the time to see whether Ms Lipton had any [...]

The London broadsheets have been in a ferment for the past few days over a forthcoming exhibition at the V&A, The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900 which opens on April 2nd. The Guardian‘s Jonathan Jones wrote a piece pointing out the French associations of the British Aesthetes in which he mentions the Hôtel [...]

Adolph Sutro’s Cliff House restaurant, San Francisco, has appeared here before but these are some additional photos of the improbable structure from the Library of Congress archives, including a picture of the fire that destroyed the building in 1907. As noted in the earlier post, Blue Öyster Cult aficionados may recognise the house from the [...]

Seduction. One of a series of paintings by a British artist, and what a great series it is with echoes of ancient art as well as Gustav Klimt. Also further evidence that this theme isn’t a wholly masculine preoccupation. Previously on { feuilleton } • Mossa’s Salomés • The art of Marcus Behmer, 1879–1958 • [...]

Three Seekers (2009) by Kelly Louise Judd. • Kevin Sessums talked to Elizabeth Taylor in 1997 about Tennessee Williams, her AIDS activism and related matters. Other related matters: Catholics lead the way on same-sex marriage and Mahatma Gandhi was in love with a German body-builder named Hermann. • Cray porn (the computer, that is) at [...]

Cover illustration by CC Senf. In her mind the queen Nitocris was seeing a ghastly picture. It was the picture of a room of orgy and feasting suddenly converted into a room of terror and horror, human beings one moment drunken and lustful, the next screaming in the seizure of sudden and awful death. If [...]

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. This week there’s another jump in the running order, from volume 12 to 15, and it’s impossible to avoid feeling frustrated by this when some of the previous editions have been so good. Volume 15 covers the [...]

Remember her for her incomparable beauty, her great performances in great films, the camp confections like Cleopatra and Boom, and years of activism on behalf of gay people: There is no gay agenda, it’s a human agenda. Why shouldn’t gay people be able to live as open and freely as everybody else? What it comes [...]

Gargoyles, Notre Dame de Paris. These aren’t all as old as they look, the gargoyles are part of Viollet-le-Duc’s 19th century restoration of Notre Dame, but the sepia tone makes them seem complementary. There’s a lot more at the Andrew White Architectural Photographs Collection at Luna Commons. Wrought iron torch holder or horse tether from [...]

Lejf Marcussen is a Danish filmmaker whose animation Den Offentlige Røst (The Public Voice, 1988) I know from UK TV screenings, back in the days when the TV channels here used to screen more than cookery shows and soap operas. This is a short Surrealist piece which begins with zoom into a Paul Delvaux painting [...]

The tip for this one came via Beautiful Century. Thomas Mackenzie (1887–1944) was a minor British illustrator whose work I hadn’t seen before, and if I’d seen the picture above uncredited I might have taken it for something by Kay Nielsen or Edmund Dulac. Mackenzie’s colour plates for the 1919 edition of Aladdin and His [...]

James Bidgood’s luscious and erotic micro-budget masterpiece Pink Narcissus (1971) receives a screening at the IFC Center Queer/Art/Film festival, NYC, on Monday. The film is presented by Jonathan Katz, curator of the Hide/Seek gay art show whose controversial history was recounted here in December. The NYT ran a short piece about Bidgood, now 77 and [...]

The Arms of the Art (2000). An addendum to the Splendor Solis post. The Arms of the Art was a drawing I did in 2000 intended to inaugurate a series of pencil improvisations based on the Splendor Solis alchemical plates. As things turned out I only managed the first in the series (the picture it [...]

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 12 covers the period from April 1903 to September 1903, and this edition opens with a feature on the French Art Nouveau artist and designer George de Feure. This is followed by more from sculptor Franz [...]

Another winter garden, this addition to the Institute of the Ursulines, a Catholic school in Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-Waver, Belgium, is a lot smaller than previous examples but is celebrated for its beautiful Art Nouveau-styled stained glass canopy. The winter garden was added to the main building in 1900 and—surprisingly—no one seems to know who the architect was. [...]

The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (detail, 1881–1898) by Edward Burne-Jones. Arthur magazine announced its demise this week: “He died as he lived—free, high and a-dreaming of love, ’neath vultures’ terrible gaze.” The magazine lapsed for a while in 2007 then returned but this time it seems things are more permanent. Running a magazine [...]

Venus: The Peacock’s Tail. The Tarot-like illustrations to the Splendor Solis, a 16th-century alchemical manuscript, have fascinated me for years, ever since I saw them reproduced in the pages of Man, Myth & Magic. Despite their familiarity, the copies online are less than satisfactory, mostly poor scans from books with inconsistent colours. Given the amount [...]

Kew Gardens, London, by Davide Cornacchini. I would have done this earlier if I hadn’t been distracted. Favourite panorama site 360 Cities doesn’t have any views of the Laeken greenhouses but they do have a view of a capacious interior of the Palm House at Kew Gardens, London. And as a follow-up to the post [...]

Invisible Light by Margo Selski. The Glass Garage Fine Art Gallery has an online collection of paintings by Margo Selski, many of which feature her cross-dressing son, Theo. Coilhouse profiled artist and model earlier in the week. Some of these paintings mix oil with beeswax which is something I’ve not come across before. • The [...]

Gertrude Hoffmann dressed for her opera role as Salome (1908). Continuing an occasional series. Some people may be surprised to hear that Al Pacino loves Oscar Wilde’s Salome. He acted in a stage version of the drama in 1992 playing Herod to Sheryl Lee’s Salome (the Godfather versus Laura Palmer), and in 2006 announced an [...]

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 11 covers the period from October 1902 to March 1903, and is almost solely devoted to the many design exhibits from the Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna, a major exposition held in Turin in the [...]

Re-reading Alfred Kubin’s strange fantasy novel Die Andere Seite (The Other Side) this week, I found myself suffering the same frustration as when I bought the book, namely that the illustrations in the Dedalus edition are very poor reproductions. When this new translation appeared in 2000 there wasn’t any convenient way to see better copies [...]

Nude – The Pool (1910) by George Seeley. Having spotted this Flandrinesque photogravure print by George Seeley (1880–1955) on a couple of sites I was wondering where there might be a decent collection of the photographer’s other work. “Photogravure” proved to be the key word since The Art of the Photogravure has a selection of [...]

Tales of Hoffmann (1932). Another great illustrator about whom information is scant; I need better reference books, the web is often no use at all. Monsieur Thombeau posted the cover to Laboccetta’s edition of Les Fleurs du Mal (below) which had me looking around for other work by the artist. VTS has pages from a [...]

The Great Day of His Wrath (1851) by John Martin. I’ve written on a couple of occasions about having been a precocious youth when it came to art appreciation. My first visit to the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) when I was 13 was of my own volition during one of our annual school visits [...]

Star City by Tomislav Ceranic. • Noted in the blogosphere this week: A Journey Round My Skull underwent a transmutation into 50 Watts; a blog devoted to artist, designer & illustrator Jessie M King; “The arts and musicks of the supranatural” at Secret Lexicon; From the Farm, Railroads, Sewing Machines & Beyond, lengthy reminiscences from [...]

Turin exposition poster by Leonardo Bistolfi. Part two of a two-part skate through the contents of volume 10 of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. In addition to the Heinrich Vogeler feature which was the subject of yesterday’s post, this edition includes articles on the Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna [...]

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 10 covers the period from April to September 1902. There’s so much of interest in this edition I thought it worth making a two-part post. The number opens with a substantial piece devoted to artist and [...]

Another monarch, and another glass-canopied hothouse. The extravagances of Ludwig II of Bavaria have featured here before but I’d overlooked the Winter Garden he had built in 1871 on the roof of the Munich Residenz, the home of the Bavarian royal family when they were in the capital. The views here are by court photographer [...]

Photo by Roberto Verzo. If the Schönbrunn Palm House, Vienna, lacks the elegance of Alphonse Balat’s beautiful Winter Garden in Brussels, the structure does have a distinct style of its own. Roberto Verzo’s Flickr views manage to hide the visitors and background details, giving the impression that the building might be larger than it is. [...]

The Winter Garden, photo by William Helsen. My arcades fetish has been aired here a few times to which one might add a complementary fetish for iron-and-glass structures in general, especially railway stations, palm houses and winter gardens. The Royal Greenhouses at Laeken, Brussels, are an impressive example of the latter, even if they happen [...]