Dorothea Tanning: Early Designs for the Stage

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Monstre from The Witch (1950).

If this squid-headed costume design by Surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning isn’t a unique creation in the history of ballet then I’d like to know what challenges it. These paintings form part of an exhibition of Tanning’s designs for ballet companies which go on display at The Drawing Center, New York from April 23–July 23, 2010. The press release mentions her collaborations as being with George Balanchine but The Witch was choreographed by John Cranko after a score by Maurice Ravel.

Dating from 1945–1953, the designs will be shown together for the first time, and will be accompanied by archival photographs and ephemera related to the staged productions.  This series explores the dynamic intersections of dance, performance, visual art, and costume, while drawing important parallels to Tanning’s early discoveries in both painting and sculpture. (More.)

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The Butlers from The Witch (1950).

Via BibliOdyssey.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism
Surrealist women

Weekend links 9

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Own a copy of Arthur #7 (October 2003) with my swirling cover pic featuring cosmic jazz maestro Sun Ra. Lots of good stuff inside, details here.

Spinetingler Magazine announced their nominees the 2010 Spinetingler Award this week. Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch is one of the titles in the Best Novel category while my cover for Jeff’s book is in the Best Cover category.

• A Journey Round My Skull posted the results of the Raymond Roussel illustration contest. Entrants were asked to read Roussel’s story Bertha, The Child-Flower then create a picture based on that.

Has Dottie got legs? The New Criterion on the poetry of Dorothy Parker.

• The gays: Fuck Yeah Hot Weird Guys, more from the Tumblr hall of mirrors; Simon Callow reviews Gay Icons Through the Ages by Tom Ambrose; Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art is open again with a new exhibition at a new location in Lambertville, NJ; some things never change: “Secret tape reveals Tory backing for ban on gays.”

• “Make the inaccessible exciting.” Colin Marshall interviews Chris Bohn, editor of music magazine The Wire.

• More music: Jon Savage’s brief history of Krautrock. The new Soul Jazz compilation, Deutsche Elektronische Musik, is released next week.

Sage of the Apocalypse; Samuel R Delany’s Dhalgren comes to the stage in New York.

• Further Penguin fetishism: “Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain.”

• Yes, they’re out there, the Clients From Hell. For a palliative there’s Herbert W Kapitzki’s elegant poster designs from the 1960s.

• Song of the week: House of Glass (1967) by The Glass Family.

The art of Jim Leon, 1938–2002

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Psychopathia Sexualis (1967).

This, dear friends, is what the art of the fantastic could give us but rarely does, something which combines the metaphysical intensity of the Symbolists with a post-Freudian sensibility to create what Philip José Farmer once called “the pornography of the weird”. Jim Leon was a British artist whose work gained prominence via the underground magazines of the 1960s, especially Oz, although he was never really a psychedelic artist as such. Many of his earliest paintings show the influence of the Pop artists, it was only later in the decade that a distinctly original and surreal imagination came to the fore. Oz was always pretty scurrilous and had no qualms about challenging the authorities with bizarre sexual imagery which other magazines would never dare to print. Leon and other artists were fortunate to have such a public forum for outré work, a few years earlier or later and they might not have found an outlet at all.

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Untitled (1979).

His early work blended influences from Francis Bacon, surrealism and the baroque. Lurking there is also the English visionary William Blake, together with the obsessive Romanticism of the pre-Raphaelites. A number of his early paintings and drawings refer to William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (first published in Paris in 1959). These were just some of the ingredients of an amazing, semi-abstract, spatially complex, ritualistic, orgiastic flesh-painting, expressing highly wrought morbidity, eroticism, transcendence and ecstasy; astonishing explorations of the murkier depths of the human mind. (More.)

A Very English Visionary by Simon Wilson.

I first encountered Leon’s work thanks to David Britton’s curating of a portfolio feature in Wordworks magazine which was republished in the Savoy Books anthology, The Savoy Book in 1980. Having seen a Leon painting in a back issue of Oz I was surprised that an artist with such a powerful imagination was so little-known. It turns out that he’d been working all along, albeit far from the public gaze, having moved to Lyons in France where he spent the 1970s and 80s painting many canvases of mystical scenes similar to those produced by the California artists featured in the Visions book. None of his later work explores the darker realms of his earlier Psychopathia Sexualis drawings, and since it’s the early work that I prefer, that’s what’s featured here. These drawings and paintings bear comparison with the art of Raymond Bertrand but where Bertrand has had his work published in lavish book collections, we have to rake through back issues of magazines for Leon’s endeavours. Leon’s later paintings at least have a website which is maintained by his family.

Continue reading “The art of Jim Leon, 1938–2002”

Weekend links 5

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A poster design by Yusaku Kamekura. More here, via A Journey Round My Skull.

First of all this week, there’s a new interview posted which I gave last year to Crows ’n’ Bones magazine. The replies skate around the usual subjects (Cthulhu et al) and you also find out why I don’t think design and illustration for music is going to vanish as soon as some people think.

• A Journey Round My Skull has announced The Raymond Roussel Illustration Contest which is open to all.

• Cover designs: David Pearson on redesigning Cormac McCarthy’s UK covers, a huge improvement on the previous Picador series. Also, The Robert Lesser Pulp Art Collection.

• Last year I discussed Teleny, Or the Reverse of the Medal, the novel of gay erotica attributed to Oscar Wilde, giving a mention in passing to Jon Macy’s comic strip adaptation of the book. That adaptation has now been published and is available via his website.

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The Kiss (1896) by Will Bradley.

• More Art Nouveau (because too much is never enough): Will Bradley’s work at Golden Age Comic Book Stories. Can’t understand how I missed this one.

• A discussion: The Magic Mystery and Melancholy of Five Leaves Left by Nick Drake.

• Sandi Vincent’s Flickr pages overflow with Graphis Annual goodness.

• A new edition of the Arthur Radio Voyage is available to download. And Trunk Records’ Jonny Trunk has a mix of obscure vinyl for you.

• Song of the week: We Want War by These New Puritans. Slow motion shots in the video are a plus.