Nov 3, 2009

One of a series of stunning ads by Y&R of Chicago for the River North Chicago Dance Company which give the old “body as machine” a contemporary and rather erotic twist. (I would have credited the photographer but the ad agency site is the usual Flash interface which refuses to work in any of [...]
Sep 4, 2009

Les Chansons de Bilitis (1922).
I’ve posted examples of George Barbier’s Art Deco drawings before but online examples of his work outside the world of fashion illustration have been difficult to find. The Bunka Women’s University Library corrects that with a collection of high-quality scans which include a book about the artist, George Barbier, Étude Critique [...]
May 14, 2009
Scorsese: my friendship with Michael Powell | Marty, Michael and the splendour of The Red Shoes.
Apr 23, 2009

Robert Helpmann, Moira Shearer and Leonide Massine; The Red Shoes (1948).
Jack Cardiff, who died this week, was one of the great cinematographers from the postwar era, a period when British cinema was raised for a time to world-class level. His three films for the Archers, aka Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, are masterpieces of Technicolor [...]
Apr 5, 2009

No, not the Australian singer. Soundsuits are wearable artworks by an American artist, dancer and fashion designer. Bigger pictures here while the Jack Shainman gallery has details of a recent exhibition.
Metal armatures adorned with a range of objects including painted ceramic birds, flowers, brass ornaments, and strands of beads, top the figures and serve as [...]
Mar 20, 2009

Backdrop for the League of Composers’ production, Philadelphia, 1930.
Something for the vernal equinox. The painting is a stage design by artist, writer and theatre designer Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) for an American production of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Roerich designed the costumes and decor for the riotous Paris performance of 1913 and the Roerich Museum has [...]
Feb 20, 2009

The Chevalier d’Eon wins a fencing bout.
I’ve known of the cross-dressing Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Thimothée d’Eon de Beaumont—or the Chevalier d’Eon (1728–1810) to give him his title—for some time thanks to a typically witty and informative entry by Philip Core in Camp: The Lie that Tells the Truth (1984). The nobleman rubs shoulders there with the equally flamboyant [...]
Feb 19, 2009
The name’s d’Eon. Chevalier d’Eon | “He was an 18th-century spy who loved to cross-dress and swordfight.”
Dec 18, 2008

The Peacock (no date).
Dancer Ruth St Denis (1879–1968) strikes Art Nouveau poses in the New York Public Library’s Denishawn Collection, now at Flickr.
Radha (1904).
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peacocks
• Rene Beauclair
• Elizabetes Iela 10b, Riga
• The Maison Lavirotte
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• The art of Hernan Gimenez
• Images of Nijinsky
[...]
Sep 2, 2008

Dorian (Richard Winsor) photographed by Bill Cooper.
Matthew Bourne’s new dance version of Dorian Gray opens today at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London, and I’d have been interested in this production even without visions like the ones above and below; the eye candy merely adds an additional frisson and, let’s face it, there’s always been [...]
Jul 15, 2008

I wrote recently about John Selwyn Gilbert’s television play, Aubrey, an hour-long drama concerning the artist Aubrey Beardsley. That play was only screened once in 1982 and, like most one-off studio works of the period, is unavailable on DVD. John Osborne’s 1976 adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray is a welcome exception to this [...]
Jun 12, 2008
Because Wilde’s worth it
| Matthew Bourne makes Dorian gay.
May 13, 2008

Colette.
Work this week designing a CD of readings from Colette had me searching books for pictures of the author. Of the few I found this is the most interesting, one of several Colette portraits made by photographer Leopold Reutlinger and one of at least two from 1907 which Colette used to promote her Moulin [...]
Apr 20, 2008

The Flandrin pose again, this time in a photograph by George Platt Lynes (1907–1955). This is from a Flickr set of Lynes’ work which was a nice find since many of the web collections are small and tend to repeat the same material.
The picture above isn’t from the Flickr set, it’s a scan from Philip [...]
Apr 12, 2008

Pas de Deux (1968).
News of a theatre piece celebrating the creativity of Norman McLaren, the pioneering Scots (and gay) animator and film-maker, had me searching YouTube again for his work. His short film Neighbours (1952) is very well-known, oft-cited and imitated for its pixillated character movement. No surprise to see it there, then, along with [...]
Mar 27, 2008

The House of Souls (1923).
Well, a handful anyway. The late RT Gault put a page of Machen cover scans on his book site which also included the excellent Absolute Elsewhere catalogue of “Fantastic, Visionary, and Esoteric Literature in the 1960s and 1970s”. The cover for The House of Souls is a very odd piece by [...]
Mar 2, 2008

One of the best—and most entertaining—films to come out of the Dada/Surrealist period, Entr’acte (1924) is also worth watching for the appearance of notable figures such as Francis Picabia (who initiated the project), Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Erik Satie.
This extraordinary early film from director René Clair was originally made to fill an interval between [...]
Feb 22, 2008

Jacob, a dancer with the Canadian National Ballet, photographed by Toxicboy.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Chris Nash
• Peter Reed and Salomé After Dark
• Felix D’Eon
• Dancers by John Andresen
• Youssef Nabil
• Images of Nijinsky
• The art of Hubert Stowitts, 1892–1953
Dec 3, 2007

Dancer Javier de Frutos (1998).
Dance photography by Chris Nash.
Bread—Bedlam Dance Company.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peter Reed and Salomé After Dark
• Felix D’Eon
• Dancers by John Andresen
• Youssef Nabil
• Images of Nijinsky
• The art of Hubert Stowitts, 1892–1953
Nov 27, 2007

Peter Reed from a 1977 photo shoot for After Dark magazine. The Flickr page this is from also has photos of the dancer by Robert Mapplethorpe, while the After Dark pools here have a wealth of scanned material ranging from the sexy to the iniquitous, with hair and fashion crimes aplenty.
David Meyer in Salomé.
And [...]