{art} – Page 507 – { feuilleton }

The art of Pierre Clayette, 1930–2005

The Library of Babel (no date).

Another French artist who specialised in fantastic architecture, Pierre Clayette’s work came to my attention via the picture above which illustrates a Borges story. This leads me to wonder once again what it is about French and Belgian artists which attracts them more than others to this type of imagery.

Whatever the reason, there isn’t a great deal of Clayette’s work online and biographical details are few. This page (the source of the untitled picture above) reveals that he worked as an illustrator for Planète magazine, the journal of “fantastic realism” founded by Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels in the early Sixties. Some readers may know that pair as the authors of a { feuilleton } cult volume, The Morning of the Magicians (1960), whose vertiginous blend of speculative and weird fiction, occultism and futurology Planète was intended to continue.

Clayette also worked as a theatre designer and book illustrator. Le Chateau (above) is an illustration from Songes de Pierres, a 1984 portfolio depicting scenes from Pierres by Roger Caillois. That writer has his own significant Borges connection, being responsible for introducing Borges’ work to France via his editorship of the UNESCO journal, Diogenes. (Pauwels and Bergier later published Borges in Planète.)

Finally, there’s a less extravagant Flickr collection of some Clayette covers for Penguin Shakespeare editions. All of which only scratches the surface of what was evidently a prolific career; I’ll look forward to more examples of his work coming to light.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Michiko Hoshino
• The art of Erik Desmazières
• The art of Gérard Trignac
• The Absolute Elsewhere

Kelly McCallum’s insect art

In addition to insects, Kelly McCallum also has birds filled with clockwork mechanisms, stuffed animals being eaten by gilded grubs, jewellery carved from human bones, and more. Plus a quote from the Prince of Quotation, Walter Benjamin: “The grey film of dust covering things has become their best part.”

Via 3quarksdaily.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Walmor Corrêa’s Memento Mori
• The art of Jo Whaley
• The art of Ron Pippin
• Custom creatures
• Polly Morgan, fine art taxidermist
• Insect Lab
• The art of Jessica Joslin

The Corpus Clock

This splendid clock is unveiled by Professor Stephen Hawking later today at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. If it hadn’t cost a million pounds to develop I’d probably be demanding that someone find me one for Christmas. The mechanical monster perched at the top is explained by its creator:

“It is terrifying, it is meant to be,” said John C Taylor, the creator and funder of an extraordinary new clock to be unveiled tomorrow by Stephen Hawking at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. “Basically I view time as not on your side. He’ll eat up every minute of your life, and as soon as one has gone he’s salivating for the next. It’s not a bad thing to remind students of. I never felt like this until I woke up on my 70th birthday, and was stricken at the thought of how much I still wanted to do, and how little time remained.”

Unfortunately there are few decent pictures to be had of the device but the Telegraph has an article which describes its “grasshopper escapement”, while the Guardian goes one better with a video of the clock in action.

Update: Longer video at the university site with Dr Taylor explaining the clock in detail.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Gold robots
• The art of Sergei Aparin
• The art of Almacan
• The sculpture of Christopher Conte
• The Bowes Swan

Carlo Scarpa’s Brion-Vega Cemetery

“I would like to explain the Tomba Brion…I consider this work, if you permit me, to be rather good and which will get better over time. I have tried to put some poetic imagination into it, though not in order to create poetic architecture but to make a certain kind of architecture that could emanate a sense of formal poetry….The place for the dead is a garden….I wanted to show some ways in which you could approach death in a social and civic way; and further what meaning there was in death, in the ephemerality of life—other than these shoe-boxes.” Carlo Scarpa

Dan Hill at City of Sound reminds us (okay, reminds me…) of Carlo Scarpa’s incredible private cemetery via a link to a Wallpaper* photo feature about the place. Scarpa’s final work (he’s buried in the grounds) was built for the Brion family at San Vito d’Altivole, Italy, and completed in 1978.

This construction and other Scarpa buildings often come to mind after encountering some disastrous use of concrete in architecture. Scarpa, like Frank Lloyd Wright, shows how well that meanest of building materials could be used with the application of care and imagination. And Scarpa, like Wright, also favoured attention to detail, with the cemetery providing copious examples of this, notably the motif of a pair of interlaced circles which feature as a prominent window design and recur in tiny elements elsewhere. Those paired circles and the garden itself remind me of the Jantar Mantar at Jaipur. I’m sure I read that one of Scarpa’s influences for the cemetery was Arnold Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead but I’m unable to find any online reference. For more about that painting, there’s my earlier post on the subject.

• Flickr has a wealth of photographs of the cemetery
• A black & white photo set by Gerald Zugmann

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hugh Ferriss and The Metropolis of Tomorrow
• The Jantar Mantar
• Arnold Böcklin and The Isle of the Dead
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s future city

Ronald Searle book covers

Lilliput issue no. 150, December 1949.

A nice selection of Ronald Searle book covers and illustrations turns up at Caustic Cover Critic. The Lilliput cover above isn’t among them, I just happened to have it lying around as a result of putting together a new edition of Maurice Richardson’s The Exploits of Engelbrecht earlier this year. That volume is still in a holding pattern at Savoy Books but plans are afoot to see it published in the next few months. Searle produced a number of illustrations for the Engelbrecht stories, of course, although not for this particular issue.

Lilliput #150 featured Richardson’s story Engelbrecht and the Mechanical Brain as well as a St Trinian’s Christmas story by Searle and Arthur Marshall, hence the cover. It’s good to see some of the original covers for the Molesworth books on the CCC page. Geoffrey Willans’ Nigel Molesworth was the delinquent male equivalent of the St Trinian’s schoolgirls and I read all the books when they were reprinted in the early Seventies.

Via Coudal.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Engelbrecht again
• Mervyn Peake in Lilliput