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Alla Nazimova as Salomé (1923).
I wrote a while ago about Alla Nazimova’s luscious silent film production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, a suitably Decadent affair with an allegedly all-gay cast, and costume and stage design based on Aubrey Beardsley’s celebrated illustrations. The film is currently touring England and Wales with a new score for four musicians [...]

Dilettantes by You Am I (2008). Illustration and design by Ken Taylor.
Dilettantes is the eighth studio album from Australian band You Am I which is released this week sporting a very creditable Beardsley pastiche by illustrator Ken Taylor. Sleevage has more details about the creation of the CD package, including preliminary sketches. Those familiar with [...]

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 [...]

Aubrey Beardsley photographed by Frederick Evans (1894).
I’ve been going through the Coulthart VHS library recently, transferring to DVD recordings which can’t be purchased or found online. Among these is a drama from the BBC’s Playhouse strand, Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert, broadcast in 1982. This follows the life of artist Aubrey Beardsley from the [...]

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 [...]

Frustration Attraction (2006).
A Canadian artist works a marvellous variation on Salomé using oils and photo-printed canvas. Lots of other fine, inventive work at her site, all of it shown far too small to see the considerable detail. A tip to artists with websites: let us see the pictures properly; people appreciate it and will spread [...]

Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni (c. 1616).
The Agony and the Ecstasy is an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, based around Guido Reni’s paintings of the martyr, six of which are on display.
This will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to compare directly the six masterpieces which are coming from all over the world to [...]

Random browsing this week turned up some nice high-res photos of Harmony in Blue and Gold, as James Abbott McNeill Whistler named the room he decorated for Frederick R. Leyland in 1878. Leyland had bought one of Whistler’s paintings, La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1864), and architect Thomas Jeckyll was concerned that the [...]

Today’s book purchase was an edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray published in 1945 by the Unicorn Press, London. It’s rather battered and the spine is stained by some unknown brown fluid that may be blood (which would suit a sanguinary tale such as this) but which is most likely something less dramatic.
The cover [...]

So the first book purchase of the year turns out to be the original Dover edition of Beardsley and Wilde’s Salomé. This appeared in 1967, a year after the major V&A exhibition which introduced Beardsley’s work to a new generation and commenced the Beardsley craze that lasted into the Seventies. Not that I’m in desperate [...]

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 [...]

Or Lust (1919), Envy (1919) and Pride (1918). Very Beardsley-esque posters by Carlo Nicco for a series of Italian films from the silent era starring Francesca Bertini. Doubtless the prolific Ms. Bertini’s demonstrations of the Seven Deadly Sins inspired similar promotional artwork for the other films in the series but these are the only [...]

Monsieur Wiley in yesterday’s comments reminded me of George Franju’s seldom seen Judex, a 1963 film based on the Feuillade serials of the same name. Louis Feuillade (1873–1925), as you really ought to know by now, was the director of the original Fantômas serials (1913–14) and also Les Vampires (1915–16), obvious forerunners of Diabolik with [...]

Takato Yamamoto was born in Akita prefecture (Japan) in 1960. After graduating from the painting department of the Tokyo Zokei University, he experimented with the Ukiyo-e Pop style. He further refined and developed that style to create his “Heisei Esthiticism” style. His first exhibition was held in Tokyo, in 1998.
There’s much that’s superficially familiar in [...]

This week’s book purchase (yes, dear reader, it never ends, there are merely lulls between one indulgence of the vice and the next) is a small Bodley Head volume that comprises part of the collected works of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), or “Saki” as he’s better known. I have Saki’s complete works already in a [...]

A few drawings by British illustrator John Austen (1886–1948), like Patten Wilson another artist whose work is hard to come by today. Austen was one of the many young illustrators over whom Aubrey Beardsley’s etiolated shadow fell from 1900 onwards and it’s the first ten years of Austen’s work I find most interesting, mainly because [...]

The Four Seasons (1897).
Typically gorgeous work from the unjustly neglected Victorian illustrator. There’s more scans of the Coleridge illustrations (shown below) at Dr Chris Mullen’s excellent Visual Telling of Stories site.

Curtis Harrington, who died on Monday, was chiefly known as a director of low-budget horror films, the most acclaimed of which is Night Tide (1961), a watery riff on Cat People (1942) which starred a young Dennis Hopper. But Harrington should also be remembered for his associations with early American avant garde cinema, especially the [...]

We tend to think of cinema as quintessentially 20th century and a modern medium. But the modern medium was born in the 19th century, of course, and the heyday of the Silent Age (the Twenties) was closer to the fin de siècle Decadence (mid-1880s to the late-1890s) than we are now to the 1970s. This [...]