The art of Hubert Stowitts, 1892–1953

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Left: Stowitts photgraphed by Nickolas Muray, 1922.

Hubert Julian Stowitts had a number of careers, including dancer, film actor, painter, designer and metaphysician. As a dancer he worked with Anna Pavlova, who discovered him in California in 1915 and took him on tour around the world. His statuesque figure was used by Rex Ingram for the infernal scenes in The Magician (1926), an adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s rather limp roman-à-clef based on the exploits of Aleister Crowley. The scene with Stowitts as a satyr owed nothing to the book, however, being more inspired by the director’s fondness for the tales of Arthur Machen. Most photos that turn up from this film show Stowitts rather than Paul Wegener who played the sinister alchemist of the title.

Stowitt’s painting developed in the 1930s and included a series of 55 paintings of nude (male) athletes for the 1936 Olympics (see Ewoud Broeksma’s contemporary equivalents at originalolympics.com). Other paintings depicted dance scenes, costume designs, people encountered during travels in the Far East and, in the 1950s, a series of ten Theosophist pictures entitled The Atomic Age Suite.

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Prince Suwarno in Mahabarata role (1928).

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Briggs Hunt and William Golden (1936).

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The Crucifixion in Space (1950).

The Stowitts Museum and Library
Stowitts at the Queer Arts Resource

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
The art of Nicholas Kalmakoff, 1873–1955

The Major Arcana

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Tarot designs proliferate at a seemingly unstoppable pace (you can see a selection of them here) so it’s probably fair to say that the world doesn’t need more of them. However, most modern designs are pastiches or fantasy-oriented works that tend towards an elaboration even more baroque than some of the older designs. My As Above, So Below poster was an earlier attempt at presenting traditional occult schematics in a modern setting. The challenge with this Tarot design was to try and create a Major Arcana set using nothing but international symbol pictograms or dingbat sets. It succeeds for the most part although I had to cheat a couple of times (creating a light bulb from scratch, for instance) and it’s debatable how recognisable these cards would be without their labels. I was following the Aleister Crowley scheme that renames a few of the cards, and some of his designs, especially The Aeon which replaces The Last Judgment, are rather resistant to simplification.

I would have uploaded this to a new CafePress shop as a poster design but their servers don’t seem to like my big jpegs just now. Maybe later.

Update: It finally uploaded. This is the shop.

Quite a performance

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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.

Continue reading “Quite a performance”

Austin Osman Spare

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Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of one of my favourite artists, Austin Osman Spare.

Like many people in the 1970s, I was introduced to the work of Austin Spare by Man, Myth and Magic, a seven volume “illustrated encyclopedia of the supernatural” published weekly in 120 112 parts by Purnell. My mother was a Dennis Wheatley reader so we had a couple of occult paperbacks in the house, among them one of William Seabrook‘s accounts of voodoo in Haiti and a copy of Richard Cavendish’s wonderful magical primer, The Black Arts, (later retitled The Magical Arts). Cavendish had been chosen as editor of Man, Myth and Magic and included occultist and writer Kenneth Grant on his editorial staff, a decision that gave the book’s producers access to Grant’s collection of Spare pictures. In a rather bold move, they launched Man, Myth and Magic in 1970 with a detail of a Spare drawing on the cover, a work often referred to as The Elemental although the authoritative Spare collection, Zos Speaks has it titled as The Vampires are Coming. It’s a shame that AOS didn’t live for a few more years to see this; after labouring in poverty and obscurity for most of his life he would have found his work flooding Britain, with this first issue on sale all over the country and the cover picture being pasted on billboards and sold as posters. It’s possible there were even television adverts for the book (although I don’t recall any), since there usually were for expensive part works like this.

Continue reading “Austin Osman Spare”

New work out this month

I designed these two very different covers last year (with some slight tweaking later). Books always take a while to reach publication, however, so both titles have ended up appearing in the same month. I was particularly pleased to be involved with the Donald Cammell book as this is the first substantial biography of the artist, writer and filmmaker.

Jack of Jumps by David Seabrook. (Granta)

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Between 1959 and 1965 eight prostitutes were murdered in West London by a serial killer. These murders were the most notorious unsolved crimes of the 20th century. The killer’s motive and identity were the subject of endless speculation by the media, who dubbed him ‘Jack the Stripper’. Links to the Profumo scandal, boxer Freddie Mills and the notorious Kray twins were rumoured. By the time the body of the eighth victim was found in February 1965, a massive police operation was underway to catch the killer. The whole country waited to see what would happen next. The police had staked everything on the murderer striking again. But he didn’t….

By October that year, the Daily Express was asking ‘Is the Nude Killer Dead?’ In 1970 the detective who had led the enquiry announced in his memoirs that the police knew the identity of the killer ? that he had committed suicide as the net closed around him, and that the police had vowed never to reveal his identity. And that was that. Until now.

Seabrook has interviewed surviving police officers, witnesses and associates of the victims and examined the evidence, the rumours, and half truths. In this unique book, he reconstructs every detail of the investigation and recreates the dark, brutal world of prostitutes and ponces in 1960s West London. He questions the theory that the police’s prime suspect was Jack the Stripper, and confronts the disturbing possibility that the killer is still at large.

Donald Cammell – A Life on the Wild Side by Rebecca and Sam Umland. (FAB Press)

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When Donald Cammell, the Scottish painter, filmmaker and novelist, committed suicide in 1996, he left behind a handful of unusual, innovative, frequently disturbing films. One of them – Mick Jagger’s acting debut Performance – is now an acknowledged masterpiece of world cinema.

“Donald Cammell was a wicked guy. I loved Donald, but he was wicked. I know so many people who will want to read this book.”
Roman Polanski

Donald Cammell’s extraordinary life was shrouded in both mystery and legend. In this provocative and comprehensive biography, Sam and Rebecca Umland explore Cammell’s remarkable life and times, from his father’s friendship with the notorious Aleister Crowley, to Donald’s early career as a society portrait painter in Chelsea and the beginning of his film career in Paris during the ‘Swinging Sixties’, via numerous doomed collaborations with Marlon Brando, to his final years of frustration and ultimate tragedy in Hollywood. In an effort to account for his wasted genius, the authors scrutinize revealing patterns in Cammell’s life that help to unlock the enigma of his death.