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Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies

One consequence of writing posts like this for the past 19 years is the blossoming into familiarity of previously unknown subjects. Such has been the case with the work of Steven Arnold (1943–1994), an American artist/photographer/film-maker whose photographs I hadn’t seen until I was pointed towards the Steven Arnold Archive by a reader in 2009. (Hi Thom, if you’re out there!) Since that brief post I’ve logged the occasional appearance of Arnold exhibitions and, more recently, the blu-ray release of Arnold’s sole feature film, Luminous Procuress.

Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies is a feature-length documentary by Vishnu Dass about Arnold and the circle of friends and collaborators who helped create his films and photographic tableaux. The documentary was released by the Steven Arnold Archive in 2019, and is now freely available for viewing at Vimeo. (The “Mature” tag means you need to either log in or create an account to watch it.) Dass presents a collection of video interviews with Arnold and his associates, together with more recent interviews with surviving friends and enthusiasts, to supply the biographical detail behind Arnold’s extraordinary endeavours. Angelica Huston narrates the film which also includes poignant testimony from Arnold’s close friend, Ellen Burstyn.

The interviews chart the artist’s progress: education in Oakland and San Francisco; his early experiments with film; his experience as a member of Salvador Dalí’s circle of hippy acolytes; the creation of all those beautiful black-and-white photographs in his Los Angeles studio. Arnold is revealed to have been a pioneer even by the elevated standards of San Francisco in the 1960s; he was taking acid in 1964, and at the height of the psychedelic era was cultivating with his friends an attitude of glamorous, polymorphous sexuality and gender play that went beyond the out-gay status of the Beats. In one of the interviews he talks eloquently about his concept of androgyny, which he regarded as an almost spiritual state, an attitude the alchemists of old would have endorsed. Arnold was the founder of San Francisco’s midnight movie shows in 1967, the same shows which saw the birth of the Cockettes, an anything-goes performing troupe who turn up later in Luminous Procuress. I didn’t know that Arnold’s midnight shows (for which he designed the posters) were taking place three years before the screening of El Topo in New York, the event which is usually cited as the origin of the nationwide Midnight Movie trend.

Luminous Procuress was the culmination of his time in San Francisco, and the film that caught the attention of Salvador Dalí when it too was screened in New York. The film is a rare example of Arnold arranging his tableaux in full colour. When he moved to Los Angeles he was living among vividly coloured fabrics and decorations yet all his photographs are high-contrast black-and-white creations. I was hoping we might hear more about the reason for this. Arnold does refer at one point to enjoying the directness of the black-and-white image, and monochrome no doubt made his tableaux arrangement easier if he didn’t have to worry about harmonising colours. But he doesn’t explain the choice in any detail.

This is an inspiring documentary, and a valuable record of a thread of San Francisco’s cultural history which is seldom acknowledged in recountings of the psychedelic era. It’s also a dispiriting portrait when you’re watching another creative life cut short by the AIDS pandemic. When considering histories like these it’s easy to fret over the loss of unrealised works. Better, I think, to appreciate anew the work that remains. (Thanks to Larry for the tip!)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Liberation of Mannique Mechanique
• Luminous Procuress
• Flamboyant excess: the art of Steven Arnold

Edward Wadsworth woodcuts

Englische Graphik (1923).

More art that caught my attention this week. Edward Wadsworth (1889–1949) is one of those artists with a single work that turns up regularly in social media, prompting a “Wow!” response before everyone moves onto something else. Dazzle Ships in Dry Dock at Liverpool (1919) is the Wadsworth that everyone likes, a painting that combines the artist’s persistent theme of ships and shipping with his experience as a member of the Vorticists, and a designer of “dazzle” camouflage for marine vessels. The dazzle fad didn’t last very long, and was of doubtful utility in any case, but it did give us many pictures of destroyers and batteships painted like floating masses of abstract art.

Platelayers’ Sheds (1914/1918).

Wadsworth’s prints, which include a few dazzle ships, are the kind of bold black-and-white art I always enjoy seeing, pictures that push their representations to the edge of abstraction. The woodcuts differ so much from his later paintings—quasi-Surrealist accumulations of tidal flotsam and other objects arranged against views of the seashore—they might be the work of a different artist altogether.

Liverpool Shipping (1918).

Dock Scene (c.1918).

Townscape (1920).

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Harry Clarke’s illustrated Swinburne

Aholibah (1928).

You won’t find Harry Clarke’s illustration for Swinburne’s Aholibah in Selected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne even though it was intended for the book, and was the illustration that Clarke deemed his favourite of the series. The erotic nature of the drawing was too much for the publisher so Clarke had to content himself by pasting a reproduction in his own copy. The copy above has been scanned from Nicola Gordon Bowe’s Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art; everything below is from the published Swinburne collection which turned up recently at the Internet Archive.

Selected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne was Clarke’s last illustrated book, published in 1928, three years before his untimely death. Of all the major Clarke books that appeared during the artist’s lifetime it’s always been the most difficult to find. Some of the drawings have been reprinted in recent collections but never the book itself. As with Clarke’s Faust, the erotic and morbid qualities of the illustrations generated disquiet outside the publisher’s office, with Humbert Wolfe in the book’s introduction stating that Clarke’s interpretations were completely opposed to his own. Given the erotic and morbid preoccupations of the poet and his work this surprises me; Swinburne’s poetry was admired by Aleister Crowley and HP Lovecraft, among others. They weren’t reading him because he was writing paeans to daffodills.

My earlier mention of this volume included a link to a defunct blog with a collection of the illustrations separated from the text. This was unavoidable at the time, there wasn’t anywhere else that you could see all of them in one place. But seeing the illustrations with the poems benefits the drawings as well as the verse, especially when the poems themselves aren’t so familiar. For my part it’s also good to see all of the illustrations, being the owner of a first edition which I bought many years ago only to discover that a couple of the best pictures had been carefully removed with a razor. This is a common problem with old illustrated books. Caveat emptor as always.

Clarke didn’t do many double-page illustrations. This is one of his best.

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The art of Nikolai Petrovich Theophilaktoff, 1878–1941

I’m taking the biographical details about this Russian artist from a Christie’s listing, accuracy being of particular importance to auction houses. The trouble with searching for information about Nikolai Theophilaktoff is that he’s one of those Russians whose name isn’t common enough to exist in a settled non-Russian form, so you may find his drawings credited to “Nikolai Feofilaktov” or even “Nikolai Theophylactus”. Whatever the spelling of his surname, Theophilaktoff is remembered today for illustrations with a distinct Beardsley influence, which is how he came to my attention. Aubrey Beardsley only had a few years for his art to impress itself on the world but he was known in Russia during his lifetime; Sergei Diaghilev was especially enthusiastic, using his position as editor of arts journal Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) to promote Beardsley’s work after the artist’s death. A later Russian arts journal, Libra, maintained the enthusiasm, devoting an entire issue to Beardsley in 1905. It was reading about Libra that led me to Nikolai Theophilaktoff, an artist who was sufficiently beguiled by Beardsley’s drawings to embark on his own variations on the Beardsley style.

Theophilaktoff’s cover art for the Beardsley issue of Libra, November, 1905.

You can usually divide Beardsley’s followers into two groups: those who pick up on the striking contrasts that Beardsley created using areas of solid black against the white of the paper—Harry Clarke, Will Bradley and John Austen are good examples of this type. A second class would be those who favour the delicate, filigree style of Beardsley’s illustrations for The Rape of the Lock—Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt) and Nikolai Theophilaktoff are in this category. (Harry Clarke was also an expert filigree-ist but Clarke is really in a class of his own.) If you accept this artistic division it’s notable that the weaker artists are in the latter class. It’s easier to disguise deficiencies of figure drawing, say, with abundant stippling and decoration than it is when using nothing more than fine lines and masses of black ink. Theophilaktoff’s accomplishments are very uneven but they’re also rare examples of Beardsley’s style of Decadent art in a country that would soon have no time for such a thing at all.

Most of the pictures here are from a book, 66 Dessins (1909), which collected many of the Theophilaktoff drawings published in Libra. The pornographic drawing at the very end is a swipe from an auction listing. Also near the end are drawings for Wings (1906), a novel by Mikhail Kuzmin which is one of the first literary works to openly deal with same-sex relationships. As for Libra, I thought copies of the magazine might be impossible to find but the trusty Internet Archive has what seems to be a complete run here. Mir Iskusstva, which seems rather staid by comparison, may also be found at the Internet Archive in a series of bound volumes.

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The art of Wallace Smith, 1888–1937

Fantazius Mallare (1922).

One of the links this past weekend was to a lengthy essay about Ben Hecht’s censor-baiting novel, Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath (1922), a book illustrated by Hecht’s friend, Wallace Smith. I wrote a piece of my own about the novel in 2007, at a time when information about Hecht’s early fiction was much harder to find. Also hard to find was any other work by Wallace Smith, an artist of considerable accomplishment whose fine black-and-white illustration I hadn’t seen elsewhere. We now know that Smith devoted most of his energies to writing, working initially as a journalist. He later followed Hecht to Hollywood where he spent his remaining years writing novels and screenplays.

Illustration by “Vulgus” from the Chicago Literary Times.

There were a few other illustrations, however, including more ink drawings in the same flat style he used for Fantazius Mallare. Given the state of the US economy in the 1930s one can hardly blame Smith for going after the money but his painted work proves that he could easily have made a living as a book and magazine illustrator. What you see here is some of his other black-and-white art. There are no doubt more examples to be found in the back issues of the Hecht-edited Chicago Literary Times where Smith was a contributor of small illustrations under the name “Vulgus”. Also worthy of note is Smith’s facility with lettering design, something he shared with J. Allen St John who created many stylish title designs for his Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books.

The Florentine Dagger: A Novel for Amateur Detectives (1923) by Ben Hecht.

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