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Skull Vision by Michael Ayrton (1943).
The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art: great title for an exhibition, a shame that it’s all the way down in Cornwall at Tate St Ives.
This group exhibition takes its title from the infamous 1962 book by St Ives artist Sven Berlin. It will explore the influence of [...]

This month is a major one in book publishing as Carl Jung’s magnum opus The Red Book, or Liber Novus, which has remained unpublished for 80 years, is issued in a facsimile edition. Selections of pages have been turning up in reviews and online previews which easily whet the appetite.
In his late 30s, Jung started [...]

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 [...]

Looking at Willy Pogàny’s work last week I was reminded that as well as illustrating books he worked in Hollywood for a while as an art director and set designer. Among those jobs was a credit for “Technical staff” on the only film for which director Harry Lachman is remembered today, a curious 1935 melodrama, [...]

Extending the recent pagan theme, Ubuweb posts Derek Jarman’s determinedly occult and oneiric film, In the Shadow of the Sun (1980), notable for its soundtrack by Throbbing Gristle. This was the longest of Jarman’s films derived from Super-8 which he made throughout the 1970s between work as a production designer and his feature films. He [...]

left: Hanging (2004); Judging (2004).
San Francisco artist Jason Driskill paints, writes and creates his own digital artwork and video, often with himself as the main model. This multi-disciplined approach is a rare thing among artists predominantly concerned with gay themes, despite the example set by significant forebears such as Jean Cocteau and Derek Jarman. [...]

Untitled from The Black Series by Derek Jarman.
The Serpentine Gallery hosts an exhibition of Derek Jarman’s work selected by filmmaker Isaac Julian from 23 February to 13 April, 2008.
The Derek Jarman exhibition will present a selection of work by the leading British filmmaker of his generation. Curated by the celebrated artist and filmmaker Isaac [...]

Against the tide
| Jon Savage remembers Derek Jarman.

Another one bites the dust… What are the odds against two of the last surviving big names of cinema expiring in the same week? I could never get fully behind Antonioni the way I could with Bergman, I didn’t think much of the Neo-Realist school that Antonioni began as a part of and his later [...]

The Seven Words: “It is finished!” (1912).
Photographer and publisher Fred Holland Day (1864–1933) enjoyed the iconography of Easter enough to stage his own crucifixion tableau with friends, as well as producing a series of seven pictures based on Christ’s last words, of which the final poignant number is shown above. His 1898 crucifixion is [...]

Title by John Dee, words by William Shakespeare, narration by Judi Dench and music by Coil; Derek Jarman’s oneiric film/poem is released on DVD, along with two other works.
The BFI releases three Derek Jarman films together—Caravaggio (1986), Wittgenstein (1993) and The Angelic Conversation (1985)—all digitally restored and re-mastered for DVD and each with extensive and [...]

The Angelic Conversation, 1985.
An unseen woman recites Shakespeare’s sonnets—fourteen in all—as a man wordlessly seeks his heart’s desire. The photography is stop-motion, the music is ethereal, the scenery is often elemental: boulders and smaller rocks, the sea, smoke or fog, and a garden. The man is on an odyssey following his love. But he must [...]