Kenneth Anger, Topanga Canyon, California, Composite (1954).

This portrait of a dashing Kenneth Anger juxtaposes the filmmaker with an engraving by Gustave Doré for Paradise Lost. Like his contemporary Emil Cadoo, photographer Edmund Teske (1911–1996) often concealed the homoerotic nature of his pictures by rendering them “artistic” through double-exposure. Teske was friends with rock group The Doors, and a number of his studies of Jim Morrison and co. are very familiar from histories of the band.

Via Bajo el Signo de Libra.

Nude, Davenport, Iowa, Composite with Leaves (1941/46).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Emil Cadoo
• The art of Robert Flynt

Megaphone from Gymnasium.

I wasn’t aware that photographer Luke Smalley had died prematurely this year until a brief post I’d made about his work started getting hits from an obituary piece at the NYT. Bill O’Connor of Wessel + O’Connor emailed this weekend with news of a showing of Smalley’s final photo series, Sunday Drive, at Clampart, NYC. As with earlier series such as Gymnasium (2000), there’s also a monograph available from Twin Palms Publishers.

Luke Smalley: Sunday Drive—A Memorial Exhibition runs until December 19, 2009.

Medicine Ball from Gymnasium.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Luke Smalley

We haven’t had any proper eye candy here for a while so let’s correct that with some Brazilian beauty in the shape of model Arthur Sales, from a shoot for Butch Swim. Photo by Cristiano Madureira. Via VGL where you can see a lot more pics.

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 my browsers.) The picture below is an older version of the meme by Fritz Kahn from 1926.

Via Homotography.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tiger Lily
• 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

I wrote about Peter Shaffer’s fascinating play, Equus, in September last year, and in passing touched on the horse and Mari Lwyd-inspired paintings of Clive Hicks-Jenkins which seemed to complement the play’s themes of sexuality and passionate obsession. Callum James had been having similar thoughts about Clive’s art and urged his friends at The Old Stile Press to bring play and artist together. Clive was in touch last week to let me know that his illustrated edition of the play is now in print. The Old Stile Press produce limited collectors’ editions of books to the highest standard. Consequently these are expensive works but then they’re as much art pieces as books, as you can see from the care which has been lavished on this particular volume. Nice to see one of my favourite typefaces, Bodoni, used for the text.

Also in touch last week was photographer Gray Scott with news of this striking picture entitled Executionist which also happens to be a limited edition print. This is another expensive piece—as limited prints tend to be—but there’s no law that says the best things have to be cheap, is there?

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dark horses
• Gray Scott

Untitled (1963).

One of a small number of pictures from a recent exhibition of work by American photographer Emil Cadoo (1926–2002) whose nude studies and often homoerotic themes were controversial in America of the Fifties and Sixties but welcomed in France, as was often the case at that time.

In April 1964, all 21,000 copies of the April/May issue no.32 of the American magazine Evergreen Review – containing (among others) texts by Norman Mailer, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Bryon Gysin, Michael McClure, Karl Shapiro (a who’s who of the day’s practitioners of perceived outrage), and an erotic photo-essay by Cadoo – was seized by the police whilst it was still being bound. The edition had been deemed ‘obscene’ by the county’s district Attorney, whose particular disapproval was leveled at Cadoo. It took the special intermission of Edward Steichen, who compared the images to the work of Auguste Rodin “the greatest living sculptor of our time”, to obtain the condemnation of three judges of this action as ‘unconstitutional’, and to return the magazine to the public domain. (More.)

Cadoo favoured the double-exposure to achieve painterly or (for want of a better word) “poetic” effects, and some of these photos were used on book jackets by Grove Press (also the publishers of Evergreen Review), among them this Genet title which I posted a couple of years ago. More of Cadoo’s work can be found on various gallery sites but there’s no dedicated site unfortunately.

Photo by Emil Cadoo; design by Roy Kuhlman (1963).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal
• Un Chant D’Amour by Jean Genet

Taner photographed by Hedi Slimane.

No, I don’t go looking for these deliberately, they just keep turning up. This latest manifestation of the Flandrin pose is from a photo shoot by Hedi Slimane. I was going to write a bit more on this subject but haven’t had the opportunity today since the webhost has been having problems and the site was down for a few hours. Something for later. Meanwhile, a commenter recently pointed out this similar example by John Jude Palencar, a Flandrinesque painting for a book cover.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

left: Sicilian boy by Wilhelm von Gloeden (no date); right: Jugend cover by Hans Christiansen (1896).

My current reading is The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (2003), a long and fascinating study by Neil McKenna which attempts to disentangle the true nature of Wilde’s sex life from the myths and evasions of his biography and biographers. Among the pictures in the book, McKenna shows a couple of the “Uranian” photographs by Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856–1931) which Wilde owned. Von Gloeden’s views of naked Sicilian boys were described as “Classical” in a barely-believable subterfuge familiar during the 19th century, and it’s understandable why Wilde, who’d been praising the attractions of Mediterranean youth for most of his adult life, would have found these pictures worthy of purchase. Wikimedia Commons has a substantial set of the photos, although it should be noted that provenance is often uncertain; there were other photographers active in Taormina at the time who catered to a similar market. One photo in particular stood out recently when I recognised it as the possible source for the figure on a Hans Christiansen cover for Jugend magazine of 1896. The cover above has appeared here before but this is the first time I made the photographic connection.

left: Jeune homme assis au bord de la mer by Jean Hippolyte Flandrin (1836); right: Cain by Wilhelm von Gloeden (c. 1902).

Gloeden, of course, was one of the first people to use the Flandrin pose, as I noted in the original post on that theme. I wonder if he knew he’d been copied in turn? That Jugend cover and its inspiration reminds me a little of Flandrin’s other depiction of Classical youth, his portrait of Polites, a painting which Oscar would no doubt have enjoyed.

Polites, Son of Priam, Observes the Movements of the Greeks by Jean Hippolyte Flandrin (1834).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Forbidden Colours
• Jugend Magazine
• Evolution of an icon

Impossible to avoid thoughts of either JG Ballard or various apocalyptic horror and science fiction scenarios when looking at these photos of Sydney, Australia, taken a few hours ago. A cloud of red dust passed over the city in the early morning and the depopulated views only add to the eerie atmosphere. These are from a Red Dust Flickr gallery. The Other Andrew writes about the inundation on his blog. I’m looking forward now to the reaction of another Sydney Melbourne resident, Simon Sellars, who runs Ballardian.

Update: The Red Sydney Project—Dust Storm Days

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Apocalypse now

A brace of elegant fencers posing for an Elle Italia spread by photographer Ruven Afanador whose Torero series was highlighted here in April. Afanador’s recent work is worth a look for the set showing a model posing in an antiquated schoolroom among bones and stuffed animals. Via Homotography.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with swords archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Torero

Detail of the Water Organ (1902).

Samples from a set of pictures at LUNA Commons of the wonderful water gardens at the Villa d’Este, Tivoli, Italy. Among the 164 items in the collection are plans, engravings, and photographs old and new. I’m partial to the older photos, most of which seem to be photogravure reproductions whose temporal distance and technical shortcomings only add to the mystique of the place.

Alley of the hundred fountains (1997).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Gertrude Käsebier’s crystal gazer
• The Door in the Wall
• Paris II: The River Fountain

Photography by Steven Klein, styling by Nicola Formichetti.

Not a Tom Waits album, Bondage Machine is the title of a feature in Vogue Hommes Japan which plays with bondage and fetish imagery to striking effect. What’s not to love about a huge skeletal necklace and leather underwear? Fetish gear is the aesthetic dimension of erotica and it’s always nice to see new manifestations of the form even when, as in this case, it’s largely about fashion designers flirting with the edge of acceptability.

Via the essential Homotography.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bad Boy

A photograph of the control room of Battersea Power Station, London, by Michael Collins, one of a series which will shortly be on display at the Royal Institute of British Architects.

The images show Battersea Power Station as what Collins describes as a “twentieth century ruined castle” – a building that was built to last, with a high quality structure and interior, including Art Deco walls and ceilings.

Giles Gilbert Scott’s enormous temple of heavy industry continues to sit decaying on the banks of the Thames while property developers come and go. The latest of these, Real Estate Opportunities, has fallen into debt which means proposals to develop the site are once again on hold. A part of me likes the idea of the building sitting there unused and purposeless year after year, like some vast Steampunk Stonehenge; Giles Gilbert Scott’s other Thames-side power station, Bankside, was successfully transformed as Tate Modern, but we know from various proposals that the fate of Battersea, whether as theme park or shopping centre, is likely to be a lot less edifying.

It took redevelopment to transform Bankside from temple of industry to temple of culture but Battersea’s unmistakable presence has a powerful cultural history of its own. Everyone knows the Hipgnosis sleeve design for Pink Floyd’s Animals (1977); less familiar is the photos of the control room which Hipgnosis used for Hawkwind’s Quark, Strangeness and Charm the same year. I tend to prefer the back cover of this sleeve to the front; that octagonal readout device is more interesting than the rather unconvincing sparks and exchanges of energy. And speaking of energy, my former employers are still active, unlike the rancorous Floyd.

There’s a page here listing other uses of the power station, including its many film appearances which date back to the 1930s. That list mentions the control room’s use as a background for the “Find the Fish” sequence in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) but they omit an earlier Monty Python appearance when you briefly see the building in operation during And Now for Something Completely Different (1971). It was closed down a few years later. So here it is, then, belching fumes over west London on a profoundly gloomy winter afternoon.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Sonic Assassins
• The Bradbury Building: Looking Backward from the Future

The Fishing Complex (2008).

Canadian artist David Trautimas re-purposes household and other objects into fantasy buildings by exaggerating their scale then montaging them into landscapes. This example is from his Habitat Machines series; there’s also an Industrial Parkland series. Many of the former group are pleasantly convincing, and their weathered appearance adds to the impression of having discovered the works of a lost Modernist architect. Some of these are like digital equivalents of paintings by Arnau Alemy.

Via Things Magazine.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Arnau Alemany

The Flandrin pose returns via this deviantART shot entitled Flandrin’s Skateboarder. Probably not what Flandrin himself had in mind but we’ve seen by now that this pose can manifest in numerous guises.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

Two Apollo 11 pictures from NASA’s endlessly fascinating collection of high-res photos. Both these are of Buzz Aldrin taken with Neil Armstrong’s suit-mounted Hasselblad. The one above is the most famous of the lot, of course, reproduced endlessly (I even copied it once as part of a drawing), but you hardly ever see it in its original tilted state like this; picture editors prefer to balance the horizon. The one below I hadn’t seen before in such detail. The lunar lander here looks remarkably small and fragile.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Memories of the Space Age
• Apollo liftoff
• Earthrise
• East of Paracelsus

Forty years ago I was seven years old and this sight, dear reader, was the most thrilling thing in the whole world. Even now, seeing again the classic fisheye moment of Apollo 11’s launch sparks a buried flare of childhood excitement, resurrecting a deep obsession with astronauts, Saturn V rockets, command modules and lunar landing craft. In 1969 all I could do was gape in awe at our tiny black-and-white TV screen as it showed men going to the Moon right this minute!

Now I’m the same age as the astronauts of the Apollo missions I look at these photographs and feel at different kind of awe, at the courage required to sit at the top of a metal tower as tall as St Paul’s Cathedral filled with highly-combustible rocket fuel. And that’s before you get to the liftoff itself with its punishing g-forces, followed by navigating a vacuum for several days in a tin can controlled by less computer power than you’d find now in the average mobile phone. None of this occurred to me when I was seven, all that mattered was the fact that men were going to the Moon right this minute!

I’ll return to those childhood obsessions later (no, you don’t escape that easily). Meanwhile the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission is naturally generating a fair amount of web attention. NASA has a new site, We Choose the Moon, which augments their older archives. And New Scientist tells us Why the moon still matters. On the same site there’s also Brian Eno discussing the Moon missions and his 1983 soundtrack album, Apollo, which I’m listening to right this minute!

• Apollo 11 at the Big Picture
• Weaving the way to the Moon | The beatnik and the little old ladies

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Earthrise
• East of Paracelsus

I’m a bit late with this one but better late than never. Brian Eno’s illuminated transformation of the Sydney Opera House, part of the city’s Luminous Festival, was widely publicised last month but I never got round to checking it out properly. This week Thom drew my attention (thanks Thom!) to this panorama by photographer Peter Murphy whose marvellous view inside one of Yayoi Kusama’s mirror rooms I linked to in March. Looking on Murphy’s site I see he has another Kusama panorama showing a view inside Phalli’s Field (or Floor Show). And while we’re on the subject of Ms Kusama, she currently has a room at London’s Hayward Gallery as part of their Walking in My Mind series by different artists. You can see a reaction to that here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Callanish Standing Stone panoramas
• Jaipur Observatory panoramas
• Infinite reflections
• Large Hadron Collider panoramas
• Passage des Panoramas
• Bruges panoramas
• Paris panoramas
• Venice panoramas
• St Pancras in Spheroview
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Whirling Istanbul

Another fine reader recommendation (thanks Thom!). No provenance for this so as usual if anyone knows the source, please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Winged things
• Dimitris Yeros

Following yesterday’s post, some panoramas of the standing stone complex at Callanish on the isle of Lewis in north west Scotland. The rest of Robin Wilson’s site is also worth exploring for his impressive range of views showing the beauty of Scotland in the summer months.

(Apologies to anyone having trouble accessing the site over the past 24 hours; ongoing server trouble is the short explanation. I’m as tired of the outages as I’m sure you are.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jaipur Observatory panoramas
• Infinite reflections
• Large Hadron Collider panoramas
• Passage des Panoramas
• Bruges panoramas
• Paris panoramas
• Venice panoramas
• St Pancras in Spheroview
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Whirling Istanbul

Moss Roberts photographed by James Bidgood.

I missed this back in January, a great version of the Flandrin pose by James Bidgood, the justly-celebrated beefcake photographer and director of that micro-budget masterwork of gay erotica, Pink Narcissus (1971). The photo was part of a feature commissioned by Out.com which asked notable photographers to present a contemporary take on the Physique Pictorial style. Bidgood’s pictures strike me as the best of the bunch but then I’m biased, having recently bought Taschen’s republication of their splendid book of Bidgood photos from the 1960s. Luscious and kitsch, and—if you’re a fan of Bobby Kendall—highly recommended.

Via VMP.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Let’s get physical: Bruce of Los Angeles and Tom of Finland
• The Male Gaze
• James Bidgood

Foiled again… Model Mathias Lauridsen photographed by Kacper Kasprzyk. Thanks to Thom for the tip!

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with swords archive

Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez.

The sight of one of Picasso’s many versions of Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) by Velázquez earlier this week prompts this post. An endlessly fascinating painting whose influence runs through three hundred years of art history. That influence isn’t so surprising if you consider this as a painter’s painting; it certainly never seems to figure in the canon of favourite works among the wider public. But artists are beguiled by the games it plays with our ways of seeing: a self-portrait of the artist painting a subject (the royal couple) standing where the viewer would be, with the couple seen in reflection in the mirror on the back wall. We are the watchers and the watched. Wikimedia Commons has a decently large copy of the painting.

I’ve long been fascinated by the detail of the queen’s chamberlain, Don José Nieto Velázquez, standing on the steps at the back of the picture. Lines of perspective draw our attention to his figure, not only the perspective of the room but also the line which can be drawn across the heads of the three figures in the foreground right. I always look to see how Don José is treated in subsequent variations, some of which appear below.

Las Meninas, after Velázquez (c. 1778) by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes.

One of the commonplaces of contemporary art is artworks about other artworks. Goya’s etching shows that this idea is by no means a new one. Goya was apparently dissatisfied with his attempt, and its main interest is the degree to which he distorts various parts of the picture.

The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar (1919) by Harry Clarke.

Harry Clarke scholar Nicola Gordon Bowe proposed in The Life and Work of Harry Clarke (1989) that the figure in the background of this Poe illustration was a version of Don José. Clarke’s picture also has a similar grouping of foreground figures which adds to the speculation. The division of space in the Velázquez painting would have held considerable appeal for an artist used to dealing with similar divisions in his stained glass window designs. Will at A Journey Round My Skull recently uploaded a set of high-resolution scans of Clarke’s Poe drawings and paintings.

Las Meninas (after Velazquez) (1957) by Pablo Picasso.

In the 1950s Picasso took to producing a series of variations on favourite paintings. There are 44 versions of Las Meninas, some more abstract than others. This one reminds me of Guernica and I like the humour of presenting Velázquez’s dog—one of the great dogs of art history—as though it’s been drawn by Nicolas Pertusato, the child who attempts to rouse the animal with his foot. Velázquez here has a head surmounting a spindly body comprised of the Order of Santiago cross.

Las Meninas (1960) by Salvador Dalí.

Salvador Dalí venerated Velázquez and he happily quoted other artists throughout his career so it’s no surprise to find variations of Las Meninas. This wins the award for the most eccentric, with the figures reduced to numerals. Closer examination shows it to be quite clever the way each number corresponds to a different figure. The use of the number 7 for the artist and for Don José makes sense when you consider that they share the same surname. Don José turns up alone is another painting the same year, a work entitled Maelstrom: Portrait of Juan de Pareja fixing a string of his mandolin.

Picasso’s Meninas (1973) by Richard Hamilton.

Richard Hamilton’s aquatint is equally playful, substituting Velázquez with Picasso and his works.

The Haunter of the Dark (1986).

I seem to have referred to my own work quite a lot recently, and here’s some more of it. The panel on the right quotes from Harry Clarke’s Poe illustration and so can be considered as continuing a trace element of the shadowy Don.

Las Meninas (Self Portrait) (1987) by Joel-Peter Witkin.

Joel-Peter Witkin has quoted Picasso’s works frequently in his photo-tableaux so the Picasso-esque figure on the right is perhaps inevitable. Witkin also has a considerable fondness for dead things so it’s quite likely that the dog in this photograph isn’t sleeping.

I’ll be surprised if there haven’t been a lot more variations during the past twenty years. If anyone knows of any which are better than this item by Antonio Guijarro Morales, please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Picasso-esque
• Reflections of Narcissus
• My pastiches
• Guernica, seventy years on
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

Brett Reeves photographed by Peter Tamlin.

Yeah, I like the fetish look but all too often it’s been spoiled by ridiculous Tom of Finland-style moustaches. Brett Reeves, on the other hand….damn. Love the black nail polish and the tats; some of the clothes are pretty good too. This was from I Want to Do Bad Things to You, a great de-saturated photo spread by Peter Tamlin at Fantasticsmag. “Off-the-charts-sexy” says VGL which provided the tip. Can’t disagree with that.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Ralf Paschke
• Let’s get physical: Bruce of Los Angeles and Tom of Finland

Feathers maketh the man, extra points if they’re peacock feathers. I’ve been unable to find a photographer or model credit for this picture, unfortunately (if anyone knows, please leave a comment), but it comes from He Said, He Said via Fabulon. The winged boy below is creditable, however, being one Lyle Lodwick photographed by Tyler Riggs for Contributing Editor.

More Exposition Universelle fetishism. Archive.org has a small collection of documents from the Paris exposition, not all of them of interest but these two are worth a look for their pictures at least. Exposition universelle, 1900; 32 vues photographiques (above) features various views of the exposition exhibits although they’re made somewhat redundant by the Brooklyn Museum’s Flickr set of tinted photos.

Of more interest is Les principaux palais de l’Exposition universelle de Paris with its details of the extravagant architectural confections on display. And for a look at a visitors’ guide there’s Paris Exposition, 1900: guide pratique du visiteur de Paris et de l’exposition from Hachette & Cie, still going strong today and now the UK’s largest publisher.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exposition cornucopia
• Return to the Exposition Universelle
• The Palais Lumineux
• Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
• Exposition Universelle, 1900
• The Palais du Trocadéro
• The Evanescent City

A shame I didn’t discover these 360º views of the Jaipur Observatory in January when I posted a series of panoramas from different cities. The structures at Jaipur are one of five extraordinary astronomical observatories built by the Maharajah Jai Singh II in the 18th century. Would be nice to see VR photos of the other sites at higher quality but for now there’s some spherical views of the Delhi Observatory which turn it into a futuristic skateboard park. And there’s also the Garden of Instruments.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Infinite reflections
• Large Hadron Collider panoramas
• Passage des Panoramas
• Bruges panoramas
• Paris panoramas
• Venice panoramas
• Carlo Scarpa’s Brion-Vega Cemetery
• St Pancras in Spheroview
• The Jantar Mantar
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Whirling Istanbul

My third CD design for the Tectonic label is another piece of relative minimalism which once again features photos by Liz Eve. All the backgrounds on this occasion are microscope close-ups of vinyl records, very fitting for a double-CD collection of recent 12″ releases.

The Tectonic logo (which predates my involvement with the label) is based on the Technics logo and for this release I tidied the label logo slightly, a process which led to the discovery that the Technics design used a variant of the Clarendon typeface for its letter shapes (it’s not an exact match). This in turn led me to use Clarendon in various weights across the packaging, something which made a change from the usual sans serif or monospace font. The great Saul Bass frequently used Clarendon for his title sequences; if it’s good enough for Saul, it’s certainly good enough for me.

Tectonic main man Rob Ellis talked to Fact magazine about the new release earlier this week.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aerial by 2562
• New things for November

“For A Definition Of The Nude”.

After yesterday’s post I can’t resist repeating something seen at Fabulon, Thombeau and I both being cock fans (so to speak). Dimitris Yeros is a Greek artist and photographer whose site features a series of studies of male and female nudes juxtaposed with a variety of animals. This isn’t the only peacock photo, there’s also a female portrait and, in one of the other sections, that recurrent object of obsession, a naked man with a sword. As well as photography, Yeros presents examples of his very distinctive paintings.

While we’re on the subject of masculine eye candy, I’ve been enjoying some of the discoveries at Homotography (”Photography with homosexual tendencies”) not least their recent interview with Exterface, French masters of luscious homoerotica.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exterface