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• • • Being a journal by artist and designer John Coulthart, cataloguing interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms.

Archive for the {symbolists} category

 

A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N

A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N is a collaboration between artist Cerith Wyn Evans and Throbbing Gristle, the once notorious Industrial music act now enjoying a resurgence of activity and attention. Evans and TG have an earlier connection via Derek Jarman, for whom Evans worked as an assistant. Given how much I enjoy seeing mirrors used in art, I’m very [...]

Posted in {art}, {electronica}, {music}, {sculpture}, {symbolists} | No comments »

 


L’Androgyne

L’Androgyne by Alexandre Séon (1890).
Related to yesterday’s post, I’ve been re-reading various books this week for details of the most curious character associated with the French Symbolist movement, novelist and occultist Joséphin Péladan (1859–1918), also known as Sâr Peladan, a Babylonian title he bestowed upon himself as more befitting his adopted role as Rosicrucian mystic. [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {eye candy}, {fashion}, {gay}, {occult}, {painting}, {symbolists} | No comments »

 


Delville, Scriabin and Prometheus

Another striking design found by chance. Symbolist artist Jean Delville (1867–1953) created this sheet music title page for Promethée by Scriabin in 1912, and the pair are well-matched given their shared predilection for mysticism (Theosophy in Delville’s case). Delville had also dealt with Prometheus in a typically dramatic, if sexless, picture a few years earlier [...]

Posted in {art}, {illustrators}, {music}, {occult}, {painting}, {symbolists} | 5 comments »

 


The art of Julien Champagne, 1877–1932

An obscure occult artist even among catalogues of obscure occult artists, Julien Champagne (also listed as Jean-Julian) is known principally for his associations with the persistently elusive 20th century alchemist Fulcanelli. Champagne provided a frontispiece (below) for Fulcanelli’s examination of architectural symbolism, Le Mystère des Cathédrales (1926), and is continually rumoured to have been Fulcanelli [...]

Posted in {architecture}, {art}, {books}, {occult}, {painting}, {symbolists} | 2 comments »

 


The eyes of Odilon Redon

L’Oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l’infini from A Edgar Poe (1882).
Another decently thorough Symbolist website covers the life and work of Odilon Redon (1840–1916), an artist whose pastels and prints were strange even by the standards of his contemporaries. His giant eyeballs and other floating figures are always startling and point the [...]

Posted in {art}, {black and white}, {books}, {fantasy}, {film}, {horror}, {illustrators}, {lovecraft}, {surrealism}, {symbolists} | 2 comments »

 


The art of Elihu Vedder, 1836–1923

The Last Man (1886–1891).
Vedder was one of the principal American Symbolists, possibly the leading one although there wasn’t the same degree of competition in the United States as there was in Europe. Last time I was casting around the web for his work he wasn’t so visible but that’s changed recently with a dedicated website. [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {illustrators}, {painting}, {symbolists} | 4 comments »

 


The Great God Pan

Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros.

“The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He [...]

Posted in {art nouveau}, {art}, {beardsley}, {books}, {burroughs}, {design}, {film}, {gay}, {horror}, {illustrators}, {magazines}, {music}, {occult}, {religion}, {sculpture}, {symbolists} | 5 comments »

 


Ballard and the painters

Jours de Lenteur (1937) by Yves Tanguy.
Behind it, the ark of his covenant, stood two photographs in a hinged blackwood frame. On the left was a snapshot of himself at the age of four, sitting on a lawn between his parents before their divorce. On the right, exorcizing this memory, was a faded reproduction of [...]

Posted in {art}, {painting}, {science fiction}, {surrealism}, {symbolists} | 9 comments »

 


Ma Petite Ville

A typically splendid fin de siècle cover design by Léon Rudnicki for an 1898 volume of childhood memoirs by Jean Lorrain (1855–1906). The author was a flamboyantly homosexual poet, novelist and journalist whose addiction to ether and other excesses ended his life at the age of 50. Philippe Jullian is quoted on glbtq.com as saying [...]

Posted in {art nouveau}, {books}, {decadence}, {design}, {gay}, {symbolists} | 3 comments »

 


Le Sphinx Mystérieux

Le Sphinx Mystérieux (1897).
Charles van der Stappen’s most impressive sculptural work and one I missed including in this earlier post. Van der Stappen doesn’t seem to have done anything else like this which is a shame as it’s a very iconic fin de siècle image, conveying a sense of enigma without resorting to the [...]

Posted in {art nouveau}, {art}, {sculpture}, {symbolists} | 2 comments »

 


Carlo Scarpa’s Brion-Vega Cemetery

“I would like to explain the Tomba Brion…I consider this work, if you permit me, to be rather good and which will get better over time. I have tried to put some poetic imagination into it, though not in order to create poetic architecture but to make a certain kind of architecture that could emanate [...]

Posted in {architecture}, {painting}, {photography}, {symbolists} | 3 comments »

 


The faces of Parsifal

Parsifal by Jean Delville (1890).
Continuing the occasional series of posts examining the evolution of a particular design or image, this one begins with a mystical charcoal drawing by Belgian Symbolist, Jean Delville (1867–1953), our object of concern being that entranced or dreaming face.
My first encounter with Delville’s image wasn’t via the original but came with [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {comics}, {fantasy}, {horror}, {illustrators}, {lovecraft}, {painting}, {psychedelia}, {symbolists} | 4 comments »

 


Arthur Zaidenberg’s À Rebours

“It had not been able to support the dazzling splendour imposed on it…”
It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged [...]

Posted in {art}, {black and white}, {books}, {decadence}, {gay}, {illustrators}, {symbolists} | 4 comments »

 


William Rimmer’s Evening Swan Song

Evening: Fall of Day by William Rimmer (1869–70).
This curiously sexless figure is a good example of a work by an artist whose reputation may not have been as elevated as many of his contemporaries but who nonetheless created an image which speaks to future generations. Rimmer (1816–1879) was an American artist who produced a number [...]

Posted in {art}, {design}, {eye candy}, {gay}, {music}, {painting}, {photography}, {symbolists} | 6 comments »

 


The Heart of the World

In honour of the great news that a print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has been discovered containing scenes long-believed to have been lost, here’s a link to my favourite Guy Maddin film, The Heart of the World. Maddin’s short is six minutes of frenetic genius which references Metropolis in passing although it owes far more [...]

Posted in {animation}, {art}, {film}, {gay}, {symbolists} | 7 comments »

 


The art of Jacek Malczewski, 1854–1929

Thanatos I & II (1898).
The Symbolist movement in painting found adherents across Europe but the western Europeans have always been the ones who receive the most attention for their work. Jacek Malczewski was a Polish artist who produced a number of paintings which can be classed as Symbolist—the usual complement of angels and [...]

Posted in {art}, {painting}, {symbolists} | 5 comments »

 


The Feminine Sphinx

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 [...]

Posted in {art}, {dance}, {gay}, {painting}, {photography}, {symbolists}, {theatre} | 3 comments »

 


Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal

La Déstruction.
More Symbolist femmes fatale, this time courtesy of Carlos Schwabe (1866–1926) and his illustrations for Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal from 1900. I’d had the site these pictures are from bookmarked for some time but hadn’t noticed that the version of Schwabe’s Spleen et Ideal illustration (below) was different to the one more commonly seen [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {decadence}, {painting}, {symbolists} | 5 comments »

 


The art of Philippe Wolfers, 1858–1929

Maléficia (1905).
Much of the jewellery and sculpture produced by Phillipe Wolfers demonstrates the tendency of Art Nouveau and decorative Symbolism to evolve from Decadence to full-blown Gothic. The sinister recurs in Wolfers’ creations whether in the form of baleful females such as Malèficia and his Medusa pendant, or in the shape of bats, insects [...]

Posted in {art nouveau}, {art}, {decadence}, {design}, {fashion}, {sculpture}, {symbolists} | 4 comments »

 


Against Nature: The hybrid forms of modern sculpture

left: Morgan Le Fay by Roche Pierre (1904).
right: The Rock Drill by Jacob Epstein (1913–14).
An exhibition of ‘fantastic’ sculpture opened at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds last week with some fascinating juxtapositions, ranging from Fernand Khnopff’s Mask to Jacob Epstein’s marvellous Rock Drill which is more commonly one of the landmarks of the Tate [...]

Posted in {art}, {fantasy}, {sculpture}, {symbolists} | 6 comments »

 


 





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