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A welcome arrival in the post recently was two issues of Abraxas, the book-format journal of esoteric studies from Fulgur Esoterica. I’ve always observed the contemporary occult scene from a distance, being more interested in cultural spin-offs whether those happen to be music-oriented—as was the late, lamented Coil—or art-oriented. Something I always enjoyed about Kenneth [...]

Collage by Jeneleen Floyd. • “…slowly, block-by-block, pedestrians are starting to take back the streets.” Wayne Curtis on the hazards of being a pedestrian in a world of cars. • Michael Hann looks back at LA’s Paisley Underground, and also talks to some of its key members. • Meighan O’Toole interviews JL Schnabel about her [...]

Cover of Salome by Oscar Wilde (1903) by Modest Alexandrovich Durnov. Gathering a few more Salomé renderings which have caught my attention recently. The biggest surprise is the one from Picabia since he’s an artist who these days is almost always associated with the Cubists and Dadaists. In the 1920s he returned to figurative painting [...]

El Banquete Magnético (2011) by Cristina Francov. • Did Vertigo Introduce Computer Graphics to Cinema? asks Tom McCormack. He means Saul Bass’s title sequence which mostly uses still harmonographs but also features some animated moments by John Whitney. •  Temple of the Vanities by Thomas Jorion. “Pictured here are political monuments and munitions depots, hulking [...]

El Trigono de las lesiones (2010) by Cristina Francov. I:MAGE is an exhibition of occult-inspired art which opens a week on Sunday, 19th May at the Store Street Gallery, Bloomsbury, London. As exhibitions go it’s modest in scale but with an impressive roster of contributors old and new: Agostino Arrivabene, Ithell Colquhoun, Denis Forkas Kostromitin, [...]

Pan II (2012) by Fredrik Söderberg. • “Aubade was a surprise success, selling some 5000 copies and going into a second printing and an edition published in America.  Martin was immediately a minor celebrity, being interviewed for articles that couldn’t mention what his book was actually about.” Rediscovering the works of Kenneth Martin. • “I [...]

House of Usher (1960): Vincent Price and Mark Damon. This post ought to have followed the one in January about the sinister portraits glimpsed in Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires. I still don’t know who was responsible for those paintings but the artist who created the equally outré family portraits in Roger Corman’s House [...]

Rudolf II of Habsburg as Vertumnus (detail). With the spring here starting to show its reluctant face it’s an apt moment to find a handful of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s paintings at the Google Art Project. Vertumnus is the perennial favourite, Arcimboldo’s portrait of his patron, Rudolf II of Hapsburg, as the Roman god of the seasons. I’ve [...]

Gille Lettmann pictured in 1973 flourishing some of Fergus Hall’s Tarot cards. At the time Ms Lettmann was helping run partner Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser’s Kosmische Musik, Pilz and Ohr record labels, and thus oversaw the release of many fine albums—and a few dubious ones—before Kaiser’s empire imploded amid much bad feeling. It’s a fascinating saga, detailed [...]

Hatsuyume – one’s first dream of the New Year – (2005). Naomichi Okutsu’s variation on the amorous octopus theme is understandably popular in the Tumblr world, but it often appears uncredited while his other work is far less visible. That seems unfortunate when there’s a lot more to his beautiful paintings than tentacle sex. His [...]

Pageant III (2005–2006). A Polish artist whose paintings have that combination of technical virtuosity and strange imagination I always like to see. She also explores traditional themes such as those below. Her website is in Polish but can be translated easily enough via Google. Saint Sebastian (2007–2008). Salomé (2007–2008). Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • [...]

Another recent piece of Angeriana, and another short video sketch, Brush of Baphomet (2009) is a kind of addendum to Anger’s The Man We Want to Hang (2002), being a further look at Aleister Crowley’s paintings. The title refers to one of Crowley’s many occult names. As a painter Crowley’s technical ability was almost nil [...]

Beautiful Century drew my attention to this Hungarian artist and designer, one of many Eastern Europeans passed over in fin de siècle art books by virtue of working too far from Paris, Munich or Vienna. Helbing’s work would have been most visible to Hungarians in the designs he produced for the nation’s banknotes but on [...]

The Tower of Babel (c. 1563) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Seeing as how I have a fetish for Towers of Babel I ought to have examined this one sooner, the copy at the Google Art Project being one which allows you to explore the surface of the picture in greater detail [...]

Saint-Idesbald is a small, unremarkable seaside town on the Belgian coast situated between Ostend and the border with France. I spent a week there on a school camping holiday in the 1970s unaware that it was the home of the great Surrealist painter Paul Delvaux (1897–1994). I suppose you could make the argument that the [...]

Quantum Entanglement by Duda Lanna. • An hour-long electronica mix (with the Düül rocking out at the end) by Chris Carter for Ninja Tune’s Solid Steel Radio Show. • “…a clothes-optional Rosicrucian jamboree.”: Strange Flowers on the paintings of Elisàr von Kupffer. • A Paste review of volume 2 of The Graphic Canon has some [...]

The Annunciation (c. 1472). One pleasure of seeing paintings in an art gallery is the ability to scrutinise details. I like to be able to see that, yes, Picasso did indeed use a single stroke of the brush beginning here and ending here. Backgrounds are a recurrent source of interest if you’ve ever tried any [...]

Naked Young Man (1937). The work of Russian painter Konstantin Somov has a decent presence on the web, albeit separated into his public works which comprised portraits, landscapes and illustrations, and his more private, homoerotic studies of voluptuous Russian men. The former can be seen at WikiPaintings or The Atheneum where there’s a recurrent theme [...]

Scriabin: Symphony no 3; Arensky: Silhouettes (1992) by Neeme Järvi. The Delville painting from yesterday’s post seems popular with classical recordings, this is only one example of its use, chosen here because some of the music is Scriabin for whom Delville created a sheet music illustration in 1912. Delville’s other work is understandably popular in [...]

L’amour des âmes (1900) by Jean Delville. Another of the many connections between the Symbolism and psychedelic poster art, the mystically-inclined Jean Delville (1867–1953) may at least have approved of the addition of a yin-yang symbol to his painting of drifting souls. I was originally going to post Delville’s Pour L’art poster design since I’ve [...]