August 2012 – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 123

La Perspective Curieuse (1663) by Jean François Nicéron. From Curious Perspectives at BibliOdyssey.

• 1612 Underture is a forthcoming album by The Eccentronic Research Council and Maxine Peake which extends the electronics + occult concept to encompass Kraftwerk and the Pendle Witches. The Quietus has a review of their album, and an interview and report about a recent live performance (I missed the latter, unfortunately), while the Guardian’s interview with the splendid Ms Peake reveals that “musically, her tastes range from Japanese black metal, garage rock and folk, to techno and psychobilly.” The famous Lancashire witches also happen to be the subject of Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel, The Daylight Gate.

• Yet more Marker: The Owl’s Legacy: Chris Marker’s 13-Part Search for Western Culture’s Foundations in Ancient Greece, and J. Hoberman on The Lost Futures of Chris Marker.

• Dr Oliver Sacks talks about how hallucinogenic drugs helped him empathize with his patients.

Paulo Coelho’s ill-judged Joyce-bashing has made him a butt of scorn this week, but he’s a safe target because, with books that multitask a little too openly as self-help manuals, he’s not so clubbable. Unlike, say, Ian McEwan, who not-that-differently declared against “the dead hand of modernism“, for all the world as if the dominant literary mode in post-war England was Steinian experimentation or some Albion Oulipo, against which young Turks hold out with limpidly observed interiority, decodable metaphors, strained middle-class relationships and eternal truths of the human condition(TM).

China Miéville on the always contentious future of the novel.

• The Foliate Head: a new book by Marly Youmans with illustrations by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

• Hysterical Literature: Session Two: Alicia reads from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

• Dreaming in Dirigibles: The Airship Postcard Albums of Lord Ventry.

• The Art of the Literary Fake (with Violin) by Jeff VanderMeer.

• RIP Neil Armstrong, first human on the Moon.

• Macho Man: Morgan Meis on Robert Hughes.

• Book covers by Hannes Bok.

• This Is Now!

• Squid Moth

• Lunar Rhapsody (1947) by Dr Samuel J. Hoffman | Lunar Musick Suite (1976) by Steve Hillage | Back Side Of The Moon (Steve Hillage’s Under Water Deep Space Remix) (1991) by The Orb.

Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers

Poster on the left designed by Major Felten (1931).

In 1914, [Ruth] St Denis married a twenty-two-year-old gay man, the ambitious and sexually charismatic Ted Shawn (1891–1972), who became her dance partner. Shawn appeared at any opportunity in the scantiest of costumes. In 1915, they founded the Denishawn Dance School in Los Angeles, which became a significant artistic center from which many creative dancers emerged, most notably Martha Graham.

Burton Mumaw (b. 1912), a student of Shawn’s, first danced with the Denishawn company in 1931. Mumaw and Shawn soon became lovers and life companions. Shawn separated from St. Denis in 1933 and formed his Company of Male Dancers. Mumaw and Shawn were the leading soloists of the new company. (more)

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of GLBTQ’s claims about Ted Shawn’s sexuality before he married Ruth St Denis, but it’s impossible to see his all-male dance troupe as anything other than homoerotic, especially when they had a tendency to perform in the nude (see below). Shawn’s intention was to move the associations of male dance away from the perceived effeminacies of ballet towards something more assertive and muscular. Shawn and Ruth St Denis had gone to great lengths to import into American dance various exotic elements from Asia and the ancient world, a process they called “Oriental dance”. This was no doubt the kind of Orientalism which is repudiated today for its appropriations but in the 1910s and 20s these developments were significant moves away from the staid traditions of 19th-century ballet. Shawn continued this evolution with a robust choreography based on ethnic war dances and other masculine fare. This kind of all-male dance is now very common—and remains homoerotic, of course, often intentionally so—but in the 1930s the idea was a radical one.

YouTube has a short film of Shawn and company in action in 1935. At the Internet Archive there are the two volumes of Ted Shawn’s Ruth St. Denis, Pioneer & Prophet: Being a History of Her Cycle of Oriental Dances (1920).

Continue reading “Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers”

The recurrent pose 48

Following some leads about American dancer Ted Shawn (1891–1972) turned up this series of photos from 1923 in which he adopts the Flandrin pose whilst enacting “The Death of Adonis”. The series is from a large collection of Shawn photos at the NYPL Digital Gallery. The dancer had dark hair which has here been covered by a light wig in order to convey a statue-like appearance. Poses plastiques, as they were known, were a common Victorian form of titillation which enabled variety audiences to admire near-naked women and men masquerading as living statuary or as figures from mythology and famous paintings. As with many Victorian fashions, they persisted into the early 20th century. Ted Shawn at this time was still married to dancer Ruth St Denis, and the pair had no qualms about displaying their bodies tastefully for the camera. Shawn is a fascinating figure so there’ll be a little more about him tomorrow.

Continue reading “The recurrent pose 48”

Chute Libre science fiction

La Jungle Nue (A Feast Unknown, 1974). Illustration de Alain Le Saux.

Chute libre means “free fall” in French, and here refers to an imprint of French publisher Champ Libre that from 1974 to 1978 reprinted a series of science fiction titles under that name. The imprint is notable for a number of reasons, not least the striking covers which impress with their uniform design and bold imagery. The combination of black cover with vivid artwork is very similar to the covers Penguin were producing for their SF titles a few years earlier but since there’s little written anywhere about the French books I can’t say whether this was an influence or merely coincidence. I’ve not been able to find a complete list of all the illustrators either. At least two of the covers are the work of Moebius, rare examples of him being commissioned outside the comics medium.

The other notable aspect of the imprint is the books themselves which are an odd mix of the outrageous and sexually provocative end of SF spectrum, together with more usual fare. Some of the covers play to the provocation more than is necessary: Michael Moorcock has always been pleased by the attention his work receives in France but I’ll bet he hates that cover. Several of these titles appeared as SF in the 1970s because of other work by their authors despite there being nothing overtly science fictional about The Atrocity Exhibition or Breakfast in the Ruins. Farmer’s A Feast Unknown and The Image of the Beast/Blown are violent and sexually excessive, and feature little genre material, but managed to slide onto the SF shelves for the same reason. Every so often I wonder whether any of these books (or books like them) would be offered to, or accepted by, genre publishers today.

As usual, if anyone can supply information about the missing illustrators then please leave a comment.

Comme une Bête (Image of the Beast, 1974). Illustration by Moebius.

Les Culbuteurs de l’Enfer (Damnation Alley, 1974). Illustration by Jean-Claude Castelli.

Le Chaos Final (The Men in the Jungle, 1974).

Continue reading “Chute Libre science fiction”

More from the Decadent Dutch

Illustration by Otto Verhagen from Yolanda – Het Boek van Bloei (1931) by Nan Copijn.

Would-be Decadents is perhaps a better label, the Decadent ship having set sail across an absinthe-tinted sea by the time these artists were putting pen to paper. Their drawings are another set of scarce images forwarded by Sander Bink who maintains the Rond1900 site. (See this earlier post for further examples.) Sandor also sent artwork details which I’ve quoted below. In addition to yet more overt Beardsley influence (the Verhagen above and René Gockinga’s woman with a candle) there’s also a striking Harry Clarke influence in the second Gockinga drawing which is closer to Clarke’s idiosyncratic style than (for example) these later drawings by Cardwell Higgins. Seeing one artist borrow the mannerisms of another is a common thing; far less common is finding an artist who adopts different styles the way Gockinga does. Incidentally, the Couperin novel mentioned below was published with a typically elegant cover design by Symbolist artist Jan Toorop.

(Thanks again Sander!)

Otto Verhagen. Illustration (not used as such) for Couperus’ Psyche (1898). Engraving, ca 1913. Collection Sander Bink. This is a personage from the story but to me it looks somewhat like an Oscar Wilde portrait!
Illustration for the very popular fairy tale for adults Psyche by Louis Couperus (1863–1923). You might have heard of Couperus: Oscar Wilde appreciated his decadent, somewhat homosexual, novel Noodlot (1890), translated as Footsteps of fate. Some letters were exchanged. Couperus’ wife Elisabeth translated Dorian Gray in 1893. (First Dutch translation.)

Sortie (1904) by Carel de Nerée tot Babberich. Museum of Modern Art, Arnhem (from De Neree catalogue, 1986). Verhagen’s Dorian Gray seems to be influenced by this.

Woman with candle by René Gockinga, ca 1916. Current location unknown.

Indonesian lady dancing [as I call it—SB] by René Gockinga. From the Indonesian satirical-political periodical De Zweep [The Whip] 1922.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Further echoes of Aubrey
• A Wilde Night
• Echoes of Aubrey
• After Beardsley by Chris James
• Illustrating Poe #1: Aubrey Beardsley
• The art of Karel de Nerée tot Babberich, 1880–1909
• Beardsley’s Rape of the Lock
• The Savoy magazine
• Beardsley at the V&A
• Merely fanciful or grotesque
• Aubrey Beardsley’s musical afterlife
• Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert
• “Weirdsley Daubery”: Beardsley and Punch
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé