Mysterieux retour du Capitaine Nemo.

This week has been incredibly hectic work-wise but I’ve managed to keep these posts going, so here’s the last one devoted to an appreciation of the Cités Obscures of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. A week of posts barely scratches the surface of their vast and involved creation of alternate worlds, fantasy design and architecture, and Borges-like metaphysical speculation. When I try to explain my disaffection with the popular end of American comics, it’s works such as these which I offer as an alternative. The problem, of course, is that only a handful of the books have been translated into English, a detail which tells you all you need to know about English-speaking comics publishers and—since demand fuels the market—their readers.

This final set of pictures is a selection from Schuiten and Peeters’ L’Echo des Cités (1993), a facsimile edition of the main newspaper which serves the cities of the Obscure World. Unfortunately, this remains untranslated but the bulk of the book is full-page illustrations, many of which are among Schuiten’s best. A number of these were later reprinted as limited lithograph prints.

Les rêves engloutis d’Oscar Frobelius.

Les oublies de Blossfeldtstad.

Les naufrages du Battista.

Sauvés!

La resurrection du Lac Vert.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Further tales from the Obscure World
• Brüsel by Schuiten & Peeters
• La route d’Armilia by Schuiten & Peeters
• La Tour by Schuiten & Peeters
• La fièvre d’Urbicande by Schuiten & Peeters
• Les Murailles de Samaris by Schuiten & Peeters
• The art of François Schuiten
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux

The Obscure World.

Les Murailles de Samaris (1983) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the first of the stories which explores the world of Les Cités Obscures, a “counter-Earth” on the opposite side of our Sun with a continent of separate city-states, each with their own distinct architectural style. Having discovered these stories first in their French editions it wasn’t immediately apparent how much the Obscure World was supposed to be connected to our own; a number of the books contain references to people or places in our world and the city of Brüsel, subject of the book of that name, is a kind of parallel Brussels. The counter-Earth explanation isn’t given in the early books but seems to have evolved later, as does Schuiten and Peeters’ introduction of portals between the worlds which imply a two-way leakage of influence. Writer and artist encourage fans of the series to suggest or “discover” new portals to the Obscure World.

A view over Xhystos.

The distant city of Samaris is the mysterious destination of Les Murailles de Samaris (The Walls of Samaris), a story which begins in the city of Xhystos whose style is fully Art Nouveau in a manner reminiscent of the celebrated Belgian architect Victor Horta, if Horta had been allowed to design a city where every building is decorated with wrought-iron curves and glass-canopied roofs, and where trams go by on elevated roads several storeys high. The narrator, Franz, is informed by the city authorities that he’s been chosen to go on a perilous mission to discover whether rumours about the nature of Samaris are true or not. Previous explorers have failed to return so Franz’s friends and girlfriend regard his acceptance of the mission as suicidal. What follows is a journey outside by steam train into a surrounding zone of lawless ruins, then a journey by “altiplane” and “aerophele”, the latter being a kind of multi-winged sand yacht.

Approaching Samaris.

The journey through jungle and desert regions then the first encounter with the city is the highlight of this story. Samaris proves to be a place of narrow streets with a monumental late-Victorian appearance similar to the quasi-historical style favoured by exposition architects of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Franz wonders why the people of Samaris are so unresponsive and why the buildings seem to change location or reveal new parts of themselves. Unfortunately the story—which ends rather too quickly—is subject to the famous Borges dictum that “the solution to the mystery is always inferior to the mystery itself”, and it’s this that makes Les Murailles de Samaris one of the weaker parts of Les Cités Obscures. There isn’t much more I can tell you without spoiling the thing altogether. But this is an early work; later stories make up for any disappointment. More tomorrow.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of François Schuiten
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux

left: Serpentine pattern; right: Bouquet pattern, both 19th c.

Regular readers here will have seen a number of posts recently concerning psychedelic culture, a perennial fascination/obsession of mine. One of the notable qualities of movements such as psychedelia or Surrealism is the way they highlight what seem to be previous manifestations of themselves which, until their emergence, lacked a specific label. Borges examined the literary version of this phenomenon in his 1951 essay, Kafka and His Precursors. In art and design, the vivid and chaotic appearance of psychedelic visuals cause us to class certain products of earlier centuries as psychedelic even though they were never intended as such. The Victorian era is especially rich in this regard with its proliferation of Paisley textile designs—which saw a resurgence in the 1960s—the fractal cats of artist Louis Wain, and incredible marbled papers such as these, the samples above being from a University of Washington collection. Of particular interest is the details of their creation; the look is familiar enough but one rarely sees any mention of how paper manufacturers went about designing or even making new works. I selected a red and black marbled paper for the endpapers of The Adventures of Little Lou which we produced at Savoy Books in 2007. The sheets used for that book were handmade, not printed copies, and had to be ordered from a specialist supplier in Scotland.

Via Design Observer.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Paisley patterns
• The Adventures of Little Lou

Panther Books paperback edition, 1968; cover painting: The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst.

If I can’t remember when I first encountered JG Ballard’s work, it’s not because I was reading him at a very early age, more that a childhood enthusiasm for science fiction made his books as omnipresent in my early life as any other writer on the sf, fantasy and horror shelves. I know that when I started to read the New Wave sf writers his work immediately stood out, not only for its originality but also for the numerous references to Surrealist painting which litter his early fiction, references which meant a great deal to this Surrealism-obsessed youth. Ballard was a lifelong and unrepentant enthusiast for the Surrealists, with repaintings by Brigid Marlin of two lost Paul Delvaux pictures prominent in one of his rooms (often featured in photo portraits). I always admired the way he never felt the need to apologise for Salvador Dalí’s excesses, unlike the majority of art critics who dismiss Dalí after he went to America. The paintings of Dalí, Delvaux, Tanguy and Max Ernst became stage sets which Ballard could populate with his affectless characters.

Once I’d encountered the New Worlds writers—Ballard, Michael Moorcock, M John Harrison, Brian Aldiss and company—and their American counterparts, especially Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delany and Norman Spinrad, there was no returning to the meagre thrills of hard sf with its techno-nerdery and bad writing. Ballard and Moorcock were the gateway drug to William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges and countless others, and I thought enough of his work in 1984 to attempt a series of unsuccessful illustrations based on The Atrocity Exhibition. It’s been an axiom during the twenty years I’ve worked at Savoy Books that Ballard, Moorcock and Harrison were (to borrow a phrase from Julian Cope) the Crucial Three of British letters, not Rushdie, Amis and McEwan. One of the books I designed for Savoy, The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson, was a Ballard and Moorcock favourite, and included appreciations of Richardson by both writers. I wish Ballard could have seen the new (and still delayed) edition of Engelbrecht but he got a copy of the earlier book. Sometimes once in a lifetime is more than enough.

• Ballardian.com
• Pages of obits and MM comment at Moorock’s Miscellany
• Ballard interview by V Vale at Arthur with an special intro by Moorcock
• Jeff VanderMeer at Omnivoracious
• Guardian | Times | Independent | Telegraph

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ballard in Barcelona
• 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• JG Ballard book covers

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

left: Aeolian Harp; right: Wind Flute. 

The Wire has a selection of Max Eastley-related materials among the web exclusives on its site. As well as a photo gallery showing many of his musical instrument/artworks there’s a couple of video clips including part of Simon Reynell’s 1989 film, Clocks of the Midnight Hours. (Title borrowed from a poem by Borges.)

And as you’d expect there’s Eastley work to be seen and heard at YouTube as well, including an extract from Derek Bailey’s excellent documentary series about improvised music, On the Edge. For Eastley on record I’d recommend his 1994 CD with David Toop, Buried Dreams, but that seems to be out of print for the time being.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Avant Garde Project

The Boojum Press edition of the Guide (1997).
(Frame supplied by Mark Roberts.)

A few days ago we had the CD cover meme which encourages people to create cover designs for invented groups generated by random means. In a similar vein but minus the random element there’s the growing selection of books by reclusive author Constance Eakins. A Flickr pool has been established for newly-discovered Eakins volumes and you can read more about the mysterious writer here.

This flourishing of pasticheury encourages me to post some of the cover designs I created for the various editions of The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Invented and Discredited Diseases, a fake disease guide published in 2003 and edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts. The anthology featured a host of notable contributors and was great fun to work on. Although these were done in colour, they were all printed in black & white inside the book, with a shrunken glimpse of the colour versions on the rear of the dust jacket. My jacket design wasn’t used on subsequent printings so this is the first many people will have seen of these.

The first edition (1921).

I’d forgotten about this until I went back through the working files, the original version of the first edition…

…which was then simplified to look like a collection of stapled typewritten sheets.

An early bound edition; 1920s?

The Trimble Fisheries edition (1932).

Title page of the “Coronation Edition” (1953).

The Jolly Boy (India) edition (1975).
(Birdman illo supplied by Jeff VanderMeer.)

The Spanish language edition compiled by Jorge Luis Borges (1977).

A paperback reprint of the Borges edition (1979).

And so to my dust jacket from 2003.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The CD cover meme
• My pastiches

Library Recollection II (1993).

Artist Michiko Hoshino (born 1934) has produced a number of lithograph portfolios based on the work of Jorge Luis Borges. More inspirations than illustrations, which is no bad thing, with disembodied clock faces and—unsurprisingly—books among the melting textures.

Garden of Borges—Labyrinth (2001).

• A Japanese gallery page
• An American gallery page

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal

Detail from La Havane by René Portocarrero; photo by C. Marker.

This week’s book finds are a pair of titles I hadn’t come across before in these particular editions, another haul from the vast continent that is the Penguin Books back catalogue. Labyrinths I’ve had for years in a later edition (see below) but the cover of this one seems more suited to Borges (as much as he can be illustrated) than the somewhat bland Surrealism of illustrator Peter Goodfellow. René Portocarrero (1912–1985) was a Cuban painter with a post-Picasso style who specialised in hallucinogenic profiles like the one here. And it’s a guess but I’d bet the “C. Marker” who photographed the painting is French filmmaker Chris Marker (who I compared to Borges last year), director of La Jetée and Sans Soleil. Marker worked as a photo-journalist for many years and made a documentary entitled ¡Cuba Sí! in 1961.

Peter Goodfellow’s work appeared on many fantasy and science fiction covers in the late Seventies and early Eighties. He painted covers for the complete run of Penguin reprints in this series from 1984 which also includes Doctor Brodie’s Report, A Universal History of Infamy and The Book of Sand. Most of these were pastiches, based on paintings by Dalí, Bosch, de Chirico and the engravings of Andreas Vesalius. I used to wonder what happened to Goodfellow whose work seemed to disappear some time in the late Eighties; a quick search reveals that he moved to Scotland to paint the mountains.

Photo-collage by Alan Aldridge.

Today’s other purchase was this 1967 edition of Genet. Alan Aldridge produced a few covers for Penguin and other publishers at this time, often with mixed results. His brand of cloying psychedelic whimsy was more suited to his Beatles illustrations than JG Ballard’s apocalypses or Genet’s travails through poverty and prison. This cover restrains his usual impulses and departs from his airbrush style by mixing Michelangelo statues with (possibly) some muscle-mag figures. And there’s a coincidental connection with the Goodfellow Borges paintings since Aldridge has also sampled from Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. What all this has to do with Jean Genet—aside from the lazy equation that both Michelangelo and Genet were gay—is anyone’s guess.

Photo by Emil Cadoo; design by Roy Kuhlman.

Far more successful Genet covers were Roy Kuhlman’s designs for Grove Press which included this hardback edition from 1963. Kuhlman, who died earlier this year, created over 700 (!) designs for the publisher and provided covers for editions of Genet’s plays as well as his novels. The woodtype typeface (of which the Rubens font is a contemporary equivalent) was used on several of the novels, sufficiently identifying that lettering style with Genet for it to be carried over onto subsequent paperback reprintings (below).

The AIGA has a page dedicated to Kuhlman’s career.

Photo by Roger Phillips.

The paperback editions of Querelle, Our Lady of the Flowers and Funeral Rites which Panther Books published in 1969 are still the most striking Genet covers I’ve seen. As is usual with paperbacks, no designer is credited but all three followed the same format of dark backgrounds with the Grove Press-derived typeface. Panther produced many great covers in the Sixties and Seventies, from literary titles to science fiction and horror; some of the latter can be seen in this collection.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Penguin designer David Pelham talks
• Sans Soleil
• Un Chant D’Amour by Jean Genet

La Place Désertée (1979).

Yet another French artist specialising in etchings with a focus on imaginary architecture. No dedicated website, unfortunately, so I’ve posted more images than usual. Of note is Desmazières’ illustrated edition (now out of print) of the Borges’ ficcione, The Library of Babel, published by Les Amis du Livre Contemporain in France and David R Godine in the US.

Erik Desmazières was born in Rabbat, Morocco, son of a French diplomat. He spent his childhood in Morcco, Portugal, and France. Desmazières studied at the Institute d’Etudes Politique, political science and took an evening art course at the Cours du Soir de la Ville. After graduation he decided to pursue a career as an artist.

Considered to be one of the finest printmakers of his generation, Desmazières was strongly influenced by artists such as Giovanni Piranesi and Jacques Callot. Erik Desmazières work is represented by galleries in Europe, the United States, and Japan and is collected by important museums worldwide.

Update: Erik Desmazières at Velly.org.

Exploration (1984).

Passage Choiseul (1990).

Terre Inconnue (1981).

Ville Souterraine (1982).

No title or date given.

Ville Imaginaire II (1998).

The Library of Babel (David R Godine edition, 2000).

The Library of Babel (1997).

The Library of Babel (1997).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive
• The illustrators archive

Chris Marker might be considered the Borges of cinema if that designation didn’t seem limiting, with its implication that literature is superior to cinema, that filmmakers only receive true qualification as artists through comparison to more venerable creators, and so on. Marker, then, is Marker, although who Marker is remains obscure, as this article notes:

Some say his father was an American soldier, others that he (Marker) was a paratrooper in the Second World War. Still others, that he comes to us from an alien planet. Or the future. Throughout his career, he has rarely been interviewed, and even more rarely photographed. It is said that he responds to requests for his photograph with a picture of a cat – his favorite animal.

The possibility that he comes from the future is a compelling conceit when his most famous work, La Jetée, is a very subtle film about time travel (later remade with a huge budget and no subtlety at all by Terry Gilliam as Twelve Monkeys). JG Ballard and others have enthused about La Jetée for years but my favourite Marker film remains Sans Soleil, a meditation on time, memory, travel and culture, blending documentary images with a semi-fictional (?) voice-over narrative that resists easy summary. In this respect it parallels some of Borges’ essays or “ficciones”; like many of Borges’ best works it manages to be both personal and universal, drawing connections which seem obvious until you realise that no one has pointed them out in quite that way before. An equally fascinating companion to Sans Soleil is Marker’s CD-ROM, Immemory, a Mac-only release that’s already out-of-date in software terms (and since Classic stopped working on my Mac even I can’t use it for the time being).

This site presents a critical reading of Sans Soleil as a rather disjointed web experience. And you can read the text of the film here. Needless to say, none of these are very satisfying at all without the accompaniment of Marker’s images.

Gérard Trignac produces etchings of a kind I’d most likely be doing myself if I wasn’t otherwise occupied, detailed architectural fantasies that owe a lot to my sainted Piranesi and (I’m guessing, since they’re both French) Charles Méryon. As usual with contemporary artists of this nature one can find the pictures but information about the artist is harder to come by. A web search reveals this:

Gérard Trignac was born in 1955, and initially trained to become an architect—training which is evident in his imagined cityscapes. Each of his prints begins with a detailed sketch, which is then fully developed on the copper plate. Each print can take months to complete. Besides individual prints, Trignac has often turned his talents to series of prints used to illustrate classic texts by authors such as Calvino, Borges, and others. His work is in the collection of numerous museums and public collections in Europe and the United States.

The wonderful (French-only) Egone.net has an artist’s quarter with two Trignac portfolios (scroll to the bottom of the page—and look at some of the other work while you’re there). Work by Gérard’s sister, Colette, is also featured. Other print collections can be found here, here and here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Photo of JLB by Pepe (José María) Fernández.

At the ever fabulous Ubuweb.

Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man (2000)
260MB (AVI)
Directed by Philippe Molins
Written by Alberto Manguel
Runtime: 47mins
Language: English

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Borges in Performance

As mentioned earlier, I designed the jacket for this excellent biography of Donald Cammell some time ago. The book is reviewed in today’s (London) Times by Barry Miles.

Quite a performance
review by Barry Miles

DONALD CAMMELL: A Life on the Wild Side
by Rebecca and Sam Umland
FAB Press, £24.95 hardback, £16.95 paperback; 304pp

THERE IS A PERSISTENT rumour that after shooting himself in the head the filmmaker Donald Cammell lived on in a delirious, euphoric state for 45 minutes. The story is that he asked his wife China to place a mirror so that he could watch himself die and said: “Do you see the picture of Borges”? This is a reference to the death scene in Performance, his best known film, when the gangster Chas (played by James Fox) shoots the rock star Turner (played by Mick Jagger).

In a profoundly shocking sequence, the camera follows the bullet into his brain, only to find there a photograph of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges who is much quoted in the film. This is but one of the many myths surrounding Cammell that these authors debunk — he died the instant the .38 bullet entered his skull.

Performance, filmed in 1968 but not released until 1970, is his masterpiece: the original sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll movie.

He wrote the screenplay and co-directed with Nicolas Roeg, who was brought in to look after the cinematography, leaving Cammell free to deal with the actors and the partly improvised storyline. It has become a cult classic, the subject of two books, scores of essays, a poster magazine and a novelisation. Many now regard it as the greatest British film yet made.

Another myth claimed Cammell as the notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley’s godson. He was not, but Crowley was a family friend and did bounce the young Cammell on his knee. Cammell, born in 1934, was a member of the shipbuilding family. His father was editor of The Connoisseur and Donald was raised in an atmosphere of bourgeois bohemianism. He was sent, at the age of 8 to the Catholic Abbey School at Fort Augustus, where his “hysterical reaction” was so extreme that his parents had to withdraw him after two terms. The authors argue convincingly that Cammell’s later self-destructive behaviour was shaped by sexual abuse at school.

He attended art college, then studied with the painter Pietro Annigoni. As the authors put it: “It goes without saying that he was attractive, talented, charming and charismatic.”

He developed a clientele among the Chelsea set and gained a reputation as a ladies’ man, seducing many of his sitters, disrupting marriages and having affairs with well-known actresses. In 1954 he renounced portraiture and enrolled in the Royal Academy School.

Such abrupt life-changes became a feature of his life. They were often caused by days of bleak depression—the family had a history of manic depression—when he brooded about suicide and death. Almost always they were ill-advised and self- destructive, particularly during his career as a film-maker. He sabotaged so many projects that he completed only four films in his life.

While at the RA he married the Greek actress Maria Andipa, but as his favourite sexual relationship was a ménage à trois with a few male friends, it was a rocky ride, and ended in October 1959 when Maria had a baby.

Emotionally immature, he could not handle the responsibility, walked out the day after she came home from hospital and rejected all efforts by his son to see him.

His unorthodox views on sexuality and heavy drug use marked him as a precursor of the hippie movement. His friend David Litvinoff said that “by 1960 Donald had tried every drug and every known combination of drugs known to man”.

From 1960–67 he lived in Paris with the model Deborah Roberts. He became one of the beautiful people, flitting from Paris to London and Rome in his sports car, but the black moods and talk of suicide were ever present, like the underlying menace throughout Performance.

Cammell drifted into film-making, first as an actor, then a screenwriter. Performance was the first film he directed. It has a multitude of influences, from Joseph Losey’s 1963 film The Servant, which made James Fox a star, to John Boorman’s Point Blank, which he insisted that the whole cast and crew see. He claimed the film-maker Kenneth Anger as “the major influence at the time I made Performance“, much of which is “directly attributable to him”.

The final edit was based to an extent on the random cutting-up in Antony Balch and William Burroughs’s 1962 film The Cut Ups. Although credited entirely to Cammell, Performance’s screenplay was written on the beach at St Tropez by Cammell, Roberts and Anita Pallenberg. (At one point, a gust of wind blew the whole script into the sea and Anita had to iron each page to dry it out.) Collaboration was a strong part of the Sixties ethos and was Cammell’s favoured method of working; it was a way of avoiding his self-destructive tendency to sabotage whatever he was doing.

Even so he managed to delay the film for a year by being obdurate with Warner Brothers about editing: they wanted another Hard Day’s Night, with Jagger appearing early on. In Cammell’s version, he did not appear for an hour. The solution was to create Cammell’s signature style: Performance became a montage of rapid intercuts and flashbacks, a kaleidoscope of images, the precursor of today’ s rock videos.

Cammell was invited to Hollywood but nothing he did later could match the artistic and critical success of Performance and, still gripped by black depressions, he killed himself in 1996 at the age of 62.

A heavily illustrated labour of love, this book is in great need of an editor, but it goes a long way towards explaining Cammell’s tortured genius.

Portrait of Charles Henri Ford in Poppy Field by Pavel Tchelitchew (1933).

View magazine was an American periodical of art and literature, published quarterly from 1940 to 1947 with heavy emphasis on the Surrealist art of the period. The jaw-dropping list of contributors included: Pavel Tchelitchew, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, André Masson, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Paul Klee, Albert Camus, Lawrence Durrell, Georgia O’Keefe, Man Ray, Jorge Luis Borges, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Jean Genet, René Magritte, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, and Edouard Roditi.

The editor was Charles Henri Ford, one of those mercurial polymaths who seemed to know everybody of significance in the world of arts and letters which explains how he could summon such an extraordinary roster of contributors. Ford made a splash initially in 1933 when he co-wrote what’s generally regarded as the first gay novel, The Young and Evil, with Parker Tyler. This received guarded praise from Gertrude Stein (Ford’s writing was influenced by Stein and Joyce) who later said it was “the novel that beat the Beat Generation by a generation”, and the book was sufficiently frank about the lives of its Greenwich Village characters to be banned in the US until the 1960s.

The tragedy of all magazines is that they flourish for a period then are quickly forgotten, no matter how much impact they may have made in the general culture. View was published in limited runs which means individual copies now command high prices. At a time when other forms of media are being continually resurrected, magazines fall by the wayside; museums and libraries collect them but they remain out of view of the world at large. The web has been slowly alleviating this problem: editions of Oz are now available for online browsing and there’s a complete copy of the “Americana Fantastica” issue of View here. You can also see the incredible Aspen magazine over at the wonderful Ubuweb. Fingers crossed that somebody eventually gives us the rest of View.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – JANUARY 1943 (SERIES II, NO.4)
Cover by Joseph Cornell.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 1943 (SERIES III, NO.3)
Cover by Andre Masson.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 1943 (SERIES III, NO.4)
Cover by Pavel Tchelitchew.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MAY / SUMMER 1944 (SERIES IV, NO.2)
Cover by Georgia O’Keeffe.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – FALL 1944 (SERIES IV, NO.3)
Cover by Fernand Leger.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – FALL 1944 (SERIES IV, No.4)
Cover by Esteban Frances.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MARCH 1945 (SERIES V, NO.1)
Cover by Marcel Duchamp.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MAY 1945 (SERIES V, NO.2)
Cover by Wilfredo Lam.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 1945 (SERIES V, NO.3)
Cover by Morris Hirshfield.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – NOVEMBER 1945 (SERIES V, NO.4)
Cover by Leon Kelly.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 1945 (SERIES V, NO.5)
Cover by Andre Masson.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MARCH 1946 (SERIES VI, No. 1)
Cover: Brancussi’s studio.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 1946 (SERIES VI, No. 2)
Cover by Rene Magritte.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MARCH / SPRING 1947 (SERIES VI, NO.3)
Cover by Pavel Tchelitchew.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Favourite book by favourite author in favourite film; does intertextuality get any more heavenly? When are Warner Brothers going to do the right thing and release this on DVD?

He had done pictures of himself that fairly radiate a gloating success, but the deepest was saved for the last decade of his life, when he painted himself as a painter at work, holding brushes, palette and maul-stick. He has his back to a wall, or perhaps a large canvas. On the canvas are two large arcs, incomplete circles. What are these abstract forms doing there? They come from Rembrandt’s reading of a well-known and indeed exemplary story in Pliny. The great Greek painter Apelles, so Pliny’s story goes, went to visit an equally famous ancient master, Protogenes, on the island of Rhodes. But Protogenes was out, and so Apelles, rather than leave him a note, drew on his studio wall a perfect circle, freehand. Protogenes would realise that only an artist of Apelles’ skills could possibly have done this. So Rembrandt places himself before the message that compares him to Apelles, king and ancestor of his art. Old age has at last freed him to make an incontrovertible, utterly simple proof of mastery.

This may be an artistic equivalent of one of those ideas Borges discusses in essays such as The Fearful Sphere of Pascal, where he plots the recurrence of the concept of “the circle whose circumference is everywhere and whose centre is nowhere.” The artist version emerges again with the pre-Renaissance painter Giotto:

According to a story related by Vasari, Pope Benedict XI wanted to employ Giotto and sent an emissary to visit the artist. The messenger asked Giotto for a drawing he could submit to the pope, to prove the artist’s worth. Giotto smiled and took a sheet of paper, dipped his brush in red paint, closed his arm to his side, and with one twist of his wrist drew a perfect circle freehand. Giotto handed this drawing to the messenger, who stared back in disbelief. ‘Is this the only drawing I’m to have?’ asked the messenger. Giotto answered, ‘It’s more than enough. Send it along and you’ll see whether it’s understood.’

Several hundred years later, Tom Phillips painted Fifty attempts to draw a freehand circle inspired by Giotto’s example. I remember being told the Giotto story in school art class and we all had a go at drawing freehand circles. It is indeed a difficult business but after a while your arm starts to get used to the motion. Like many things in art, practice is the key.