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From the earliest days of YouTube there were two films about Surrealist art that I’d been hoping would one day be posted somewhere so I could watch them again. One was José Montes-Baquer’s collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Impressions de la Haute Mongolie – Hommage á Raymond Roussel (1976), which eventually turned up at Ubuweb; the [...]

Funeral In Berlin (1981) by Throbbing Gristle. British artist and musician Val Denham was mentioned in yesterday’s post so I thought it worthwhile following up with a selection of the painter’s record sleeves. Denham’s art stood out for me when I first saw the cover of Throbbing Gristle’s Funeral In Berlin album. For its visceral [...]

Marc Almond (1983) by John Coulthart. This, girls and boys, is how we occupied ourselves in the long nights before the advent of 24-hour television: we sat up drawing portraits of Marc Almond. A conversation on Twitter reminded me of this, a drawing that’s never before appeared in public but which is now added to [...]

Every Man and Woman is a Star (detail, 2008) by Jesse Bransford. Observatory in Brooklyn, NYC, hosts another occult-themed group show next month. Signs & Sigils is curated by Phantasmaphile‘s Pam Grossman who says: The fibers of art and magic are woven so tightly together, it’s often said that they are one and the same.  [...]

So now that I have your undivided attention… You’d think someone would have tried a male variation on Hokusai’s notorious Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814) before now but if they have I’ve not seen it. Hokusai gives us a father-and-son pair of amorous octopuses but the smaller creature is missing from this picture by [...]

Violet Dark Spring of the Numinous Orb (2011). Those for whom Enter the Void wasn’t enough (I know you’re out there) are advised to direct their attention to the prints and videos of Japanese artist Yoshi Sodeoka. The website has numerous screen grabs and examples of the prints while the artist’s Vimeo channel has the [...]

Kraken from Ernie Cabat’s Magical World Of Monsters (1992) at Monster Brains. “I think for a lot of people who don’t read pulp growing up, there’s a real surprise that the particular kind of Pulp Modernism of a certain kind of lush purple prose isn’t necessarily a failure or a mistake, but is part of [...]

Svankmajer? Yes, Václav is the son of Czech Surrealists Jan Svankmajer and Eva Svankmajerová, and The Torchbearer (2005) is the third of three short films he’s directed. Like the celebrated films of his father this is an animated piece in which a faceless warrior navigates a ruined labyrinth where lethal traps are prepared by a [...]

Earlier this week, a friend online (hi Wendy) suggested that if American politicians continue to insist on punitively interfering with the female body it might be time for women to deprive the same men of pleasurable access to those bodies. I directed her to the plot of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the most celebrated example of withholding [...]

Butterfly. Hyeyeol is the nom de l’art of a South Korean woman whose work was drawn to my attention by regular commenter Wiley (thanks!) and a suggestion that some of the homoerotic imagery is reminiscent of the elusive NoBeast. I agree, and feel there’s also a similarity to Takato Yamamoto in the blend of stylised [...]

One of the many surprises for me about Enter the Void was finding recordings by electronic composer Jean-Claude Eloy mixed into its droning soundscape, notably extracts from his 1979 album, Shànti. I’d been listening to this a week or so before watching the film after having downloaded a large quantity of obscure electronic releases on [...]

No Blu-ray as yet but this is another excellent BFI release so it looks and sounds fantastic. There’s been some grumbling that the 1971 director’s cut is still being embargoed by Warner Brothers but when the rest of the film looks so pristine I find it difficult to get worked up over a few missing [...]

It’s taken me a while to see this but the long search for a genuinely psychedelic feature film is over. That’s genuinely psychedelic not in the debased sense of a handful of garish or trippy visuals, but in the full-spectrum expanded-consciousness sense for which Humphrey Osmond invented the term in 1956: I have tried to [...]

How to become a mermaid and dissolve into sea foam in just seven surgical operations (2010) by Carla Bedini. • D.I.Y. Magic was a regular feature in the late Arthur Magazine that’s now become a book by Anthony Alvarado: “Think of it as jail-breaking the iPhone of your mind. Teaching it to do things that [...]

Untitled (Salomé, no date). I was looking for work by the artist, Richard Bruce Nugent (1906–1987), not more Salomé illustrations so this was a surprise discovery. Nugent was an American writer, illustrator and painter who was friends in the 1920s with key figures in the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Unlike [...]

Say the name Palatino today and the only thing it brings to mind for most people is the elegant typeface designed by Hermann Zapf in 1948. Giovanni Battista Palatino (c.1515–c.1575) is the Italian calligrapher from whom Zapf took the name, and the pages here are from a 1550 reprinting of one of Palatino’s sample books, [...]

Mr Lovecraft by JK Potter. HP Lovecraft died seventy-five years ago on 15th March, 1937. Twenty-five years ago I was halfway through drawing my comic strip adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu, conscious at the time that, yes, it was fifty years ago today… I mentioned at the weekend the special Lovecraft edition of Heavy [...]

‘Reason’ and ‘Fancy’ are my Sun and Moon. The first dispels vapours and clears up the face of things, the other throws over Nature a dim haze and may be styled the Queen of Delusions. William Beckford My thanks to Sidney Blackmore, Secretary of the Beckford Society, who posted me a copy of the latest [...]

Geneviève Vix (1926) by P. Godard. The poster below turned up recently at Beautiful Century, a promotional piece for the Richard Strauss opera in which the splendidly named French soprano Geneviève Vix (1879–1939) took the role of Salomé. The portrait of Mademoiselle Vix by Kees Van Dongen is of interest for the link it provides [...]

Docteur Faust (1971) by Igor Wakhévitch. Philippe Druillet: album cover artist. As with John Martin, I’m surprised there aren’t more examples. Once again, Discogs.com proves incomplete so I’ve added a couple more including the first on this list, Docteur Faust. If you know of any others, please leave a comment. Igor Wakhévitch’s berserk masterpiece is [...]

From the Crystal Saga portfolio (1986) by Moebius. Via Quenched Consciousness. Moebius: A while ago, [science fiction] was filled with monstrous rocket ships and planets; it was a naive and materialistic vision, which confused external space with internal space, which saw the future as an extrapolation of the present. It was a victim of an [...]

Something I’d had bookmarked for ages then overlooked, French photographer Bertrand Le Pluard borrows the Flandrin pose for a Raf Simons shoes feature in Wad Magazine. In addition to another shot avec génitales at the Le Pluard site there’s also a feature here and here for German gay mag Kaiserin celebrating those queer hippies known [...]

Angel Witch (1980) by Angel Witch. Art: The Fallen Angels Entering Pandemonium (1841). It’s been a busy week so the posts just now are tending towards haste and laziness. The paintings of John Martin (1789–1854) make such good album covers you’d expect that there were more than this handful. Perhaps there are (Discogs.com contains numerous [...]

More gorgeous work from elusive British illustrator Henry Keen (1871–1935). These are some of the ink drawings Keen provided for a 1930 edition of John Webster’s Jacobean tragedies The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil. In addition to eleven full-page illustrations there are decorative embellishments, and as usual it’s a shame there isn’t anywhere [...]

Maggs Bros. Ltd, London, hosts two events soon featuring { feuilleton } friends and cohorts. First up is Paul Schütze with Air Into Light, a showing of eighteen of his photo prints with musical and perfume accompaniment. Paul has been making perfume a subject of particular concern recently. The combination of sound and scent is [...]

Pilgrim Of The Sublunary World (2002) by Heid. It would have been surprising if Magazine were the only group to have used Odilon Redon’s art for album covers. What is surprising is that these releases are all relatively recent and aren’t the cluster of Goth doodlings I would have expected: descriptions at Discogs list Heid [...]

Shot By Both Sides (1978). Design by Malcolm Garrett. Art: La Chimere regarda avec effroi toutes choses (1886) by Odilon Redon. The first two albums by British post-punk band Magazine have been soundtracking the inner landscape here for the past couple of weeks. Looking at some of their cover art on Discogs reminded me that [...]

The Arcimboldo Effect again. An undated postcard from the image section of A Virtual Wunderkammer: Early Twentieth Century Erotica in Spain. “I took George Clinton and Bootsy Collins to the Battle Station for the first time, and they left feeling like they’d just had a close encounter,” said the bassist and music producer Bill Laswell, [...]

The Opium Den (1881) by William Lamb Picknell. The romantic side of the addiction business. Needless to say, there’s a lot more of this kind of thing. The ultimate opium-related pictorial art is still Attila Sassy’s remarkable Opium Dreams from 1909, a series of drawings which can be seen at 50 Watts in high-quality scans. [...]

When bachelor dens cast over waking hours a loneliness so deep (1904). From morphine to opium. Despite drug addiction being an equal opportunities affair, many representations of opium dens in the late 19th and early 20th centuries tend to show women as the victims. This is probably chauvinistic in part—women being thought of as the [...]

Manuel Orazi’s illustrations (above and below) have been travelling the recursive paths of the Tumblr labyrinth recently. I was hoping to find covers for other editions but the third image here (from 1930) is the only one that’s turned up. La Morphine, Vices et passions des morphinomanes by Victorien du Saussay was published in 1906, [...]