Mighty Baby (1969). Illustration by Martin Sharp.

Yet another album cover prompts this post, part of an occasional series. Mighty Baby were a British rock band who formed out of psychedelic group The Action in the late Sixties, and their music is fairly typical of the period, being “heavy” without any of the psych trappings which—for me—often make everything from that time a lot more interesting. This was a journey undertaken by many groups at the end of that lurid decade, a junking of the playful and evocative side of what was now called rock music in favour of a denim-clad earnestness. This album isn’t one I like very much—I’d rather listen to their earlier incarnation—but the cover painting by psych artist Martin Sharp is certainly a startling piece, being a violent mutation of one of the most famous Tarzan drawings by comic artist Burne Hogarth.

Tarzan by Burne Hogarth (194?).

Hogarth was drawing Tarzan for much of the 1940s and this particular panel showing the Ape-Man attacking Numa the lion dates from the latter part of his run on the series. I wish I could pin this to an actual year but I don’t have a complete set of the comics and that detail eluded me. If anyone knows the date, please leave a comment.

Reverbstorm 7 (2000).

Readers of the Savoy comics series, Reverbstorm, which David Britton and I created in the 1990s, will be familiar with its many references to Hogarth and other artists (some of which were catalogued here). The image of Tarzan and Numa was reworked on three separate occasions. The first was a double-page piece in a long run of pages which are the most excessive and outrageous things I’ve drawn to date. Burne Hogarth saw some of this work, including this spread, and while he wasn’t impressed at all by the violence he had the good grace to say some very flattering things about my drawing.

That image of Lord Horror on the solar-phallic lion was reworked for the cover painting in a style intended to resemble the work of Frank Frazetta. This version also tries to match Hogarth’s original more closely.

Near the end of Reverbstorm #7 one finds this panel showing Jessie Matthews astride Picasso’s bull from Guernica (1937) in the midst of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884). How the story gets to a point of such intertextual confusion would involve far too much explanation; the curious will just have to buy the comics, or wait for the definitive book edition to appear.

I’m fairly sure I’ve seen other reworkings of Hogarth’s drawing aside from the Sharp version. If anyone knows of others, please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #10: Victor Moscoso
• Design as virus #9: Mondrian fashions
• Max (The Birdman) Ernst
• Design as virus #8: Keep Calm and Carry On
• Design as virus #7: eyes and triangles
• Design as virus #6: Cassandre
• Design as virus #5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus #4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders
• My pastiches
• A premonition of Premonition

Continuing from yesterday’s post, Bernie Wrightson appears in this 2003 documentary about the great fantasy artist Frank Frazetta. (And Frazetta is another artist who acknowledges a debt to Roy G Krenkel.) I saw this when it first appeared on video and it’s essential viewing for anyone interested in Frazetta’s work. Stephanie Bruder wrote this week to inform me that the film is now available through iTunes (US store only, for now; UK release is being arranged).

For the last half century, Frank Frazetta has dominated the fantasy art world with his visceral images of savage warriors, curvaceous princesses, and fantastical creatures set in the most lavish landscapes. In this critically acclaimed documentary, we journey to a place where up until now, only the privileged have been. For the first time on film, the reclusive Frazetta reveals to us details of his astonishing life, including how he learned to draw left handed at the age of 70 after suffering a debilitating stroke. Dozens of other professionals candidly weigh in on Frank’s career, including comic legends Bernie Wrightson, Dave Stevens, William Stout, Neal Adams, Al Williamson, Forrest Ackerman and film directors Ralph Bakshi and John Milius.  Also appearing are rocker Glenn Danzig, actress Bo Derek and fantasy artists Brom, Simon Bisley, and Joe Jusko. Mirroring the dramatic nature of his work, this film utilizes visual effects and a breathtaking orchestral score to create astonishing results. Painting With Fire tells of a life, the spark of an artist, and what Frazetta means to future inspirations. Frank Frazetta is not just a pop phenomenon, but a creative artist destined for a serious place in art history.

Frazetta’s official site is here, this unofficial site has a great selection of his paintings and his influence in some of my own work was recounted here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Men with snakes
• My pastiches
• Fantastic art from Pan Books

Matthijs Kool, middeleeuws zwaardvechten.

Yes, the web breeds fetishes you weren’t even aware of once…. I blame Frank Frazetta for my interest in naked men with swords. This photo of Matthijs Kool is one of a series by Ewoud Broeksma who specialises in portraits of athletes and sports people.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with swords archive

So it arrived at last, yesterday in fact, the colossal volume that is A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft from Centipede Press. Calling this a book is like calling the Great Pyramid of Cheops a pile of stones, technically accurate but the words somewhat fail to convey the existential reality. This is the heaviest book I’ve ever come across, 400 pages of heavy-duty art paper at BIG size. (Amazon gives the dimensions as 16.1 x 12.6 x 2.3 inches or 409 x 320 x 580 mm.) The photo above shows the scale beside an old Mountains of Madness paperback (Ian Miller’s cover art appears in full in the new book) and my own Haunter of the Dark collection. The cover art is by Michael Whelan, a detail from his wonderful 1981 HPL panoramas.

The Virgil Finlay section showing The Colour Out of Space and his definitive Lovecraft portrait.

The range of contributors past and present includes JK Potter, HR Giger, Raymond Bayless, Ian Miller, Virgil Finlay, Lee Brown Coye, Hannes Bok, Rowena Morrill, Bob Eggleton, Allen Koszowski, Mike Mignola, Howard V. Brown, Michael Whelan, Tim White, Frank Frazetta, John Holmes, Harry O. Morris, Murray Tinkelman, Gabriel, Don Punchatz, Helmut Wenske, John Stewart, Thomas Ligotti and John Jude Palencar. The introduction is by Harlan Ellison and there’s an afterword by Thomas Ligotti. Many pages fold out to reveal spreads like the Giger ones below. Print quality is exceptional, of course, but then ladling the superlatives is pointless when it’s obvious this is a sui generis masterpiece of Lovecraftian art. Naturally I’m very happy indeed to be a part of it.

A pair of Necronoms by HR Giger.

I don’t have to photograph too much since other people have been doing the same with their copies. Matt Staggs has more pictures of the contents here and Jeff VanderMeer has made the book a feature of his latest art column for io9. Jeff talks to Centipede Press’s Jerad Walters about the book’s production and notes on his own blog what an important, landmark volume this is. Having done my fair share of book production I can imagine what an undertaking it was. Jerad should be very pleased he’s been able to put together a book which bests the productions of multinational publishers with their armies of staff. And we might even ask why it’s left to a small independent publisher to produce something of this quality at all.

Jeff asked me a few questions for his io9 piece which I’m reproducing in full here.

• Everyone knows what Lovecraft means to fantasy and horror. What do you think he meant for the idea of “cosmic SF”?

JC: The young Lovecraft was a keen astronomer who became acquainted at an early age with a sense of cosmic scale, the vastness of the universe and so on. That combined with a natural pessimism and his later atheism gave him a strong sense of human insignificance in the face of cosmic enormity. “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity,” as he says at the opening of The Call of Cthulhu.

His problem as a writer was that most Western supernatural fiction up to that point had some kind of Christian dimension to it, even if this wasn’t directly stated. That was obviously a problem for an atheist writing a form of fiction which needed something malevolent at its core. His solution was to replace the Devil and the Christian idea of evil with vast extra-dimensional entities which disturb or threaten us either because we mean as much to them as microbes do to human beings or (in the case of Cthulhu) they’re eager to take reclaim the earth for their own destructive ends. All of Lovecraft’s best fiction tends to be sf used for horror purposes; he’s telling the same old tales about what might lurk in the dark beyond the campfire, only the campfire is now the planet Earth and the dark is the interstellar void.

• What personally resonates with you re Lovecraft?

JC: I think initially it was that skilful blend of sf and horror. When I was a kid I always enjoyed reading ghosts stories as much as science fiction. The first story of Lovecraft’s I read was The Colour Out of Space, a tale of a meteorite which crashes near a farm and whose insidious infection slowly affects the farm and the surrounding countryside. That’s an incredibly chilling story—one of his very best—and yet there’s nothing supernatural in it. In his best work he builds a sinister atmosphere to a remarkable degree, something he’d learned by studying previous writers. Other writers of the period and even more recent writers often seem lightweight in comparison. Later on I got drawn into the tangled web of the Cthulhu Mythos which is a compelling attraction for new readers.

The Call of Cthulhu (1988).

• How did you put your personal stamp on your Lovecraft-influenced art?

JC: I wanted to take Lovecraft’s fiction seriously on its own terms, something which—in the comics world especially—wasn’t happening very often. When I started illustrating his work in the 1980s there was little apart from the Lovecraft special issue of Heavy Metal from 1979 which had attempted that. I tried to match his dense writing style with an equally dense and detailed drawing style and tried to make things look solid and historically accurate. I’ve always been interested in architecture and Lovecraft’s concept of alien architecture continues to fascinate; I explored that in a small way last year in a picture commissioned for a Swiss exhibition (below).

Detail from “Mirage in time—image of long-vanish’d pre-human city” (2007).

• Lovecraft clearly tapped into something hidden or buried in readers. What was it, as far as you’re concerned?

I’ve thought for years that the invented mythology is one of the things which really hits people, even if they don’t read many of the stories. It was this which powered the Call of Cthulhu role-playing games. People don’t have to be religious to feel the draw of a mythology or invented taxonomy, you can see that in other areas whether it’s Star Trek, Star Wars or Harry Potter. That’s probably the juvenile attraction; the more sophisticated one would be the attraction for people such as Michel Houellebecq who see Lovecraft as a kind of pulp Kafka or Camus. You can be drawn into his writing by something trivial like Hello Cthulhu then journey deeper to discover a great imagination at work and even a philosophical viewpoint; anything that works on all those levels we need to label “art”.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Horror comics
• The art of Ian Miller
• At the Mountains of Madness
• Witness my hand and official seal
• Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs

Laocoön and His Sons attributed to Agesander, Athenodoros
and Polydorus of Rhodes (c. 160–20 BCE).

No jokes about snakes in a frame, please. Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (1986) is a wide-ranging study of the “iconography of misogyny” in 19th century painting. Dijkstra examines the numerous ways that women were depicted in late Victorian and Symbolist art, with one chapter, “Connoisseurs and Bestiality and Serpentine Delights”, being devoted to representations of women with animals, especially snakes. The story of Eve and the Serpent prompts many of these latter images, of course, while scenes with other creatures seem intended to demonstrate the Victorian attitude that woman was closer to the brute beasts than man and could often be found conspiring with them to bring down her masculine masters.

Needless to say, men have rarely been depicted so uncharitably; when men encounter animals in art the animals are usually being put to some use or roundly slaughtered. The sole exception seems to be when snakes are involved although these still tend to be scenes of conflict. This raises no end (as it were) of Freudian implications. Dragons have a lengthy history in art, from images of St Michael and St George to various legends, but snakes really came into their own in western art with the discovery of the Laocoön statue in 1506. This ancient sculpture, depicting Laocoön and his sons being attacked by serpents, had been acclaimed by Pliny as one of the greatest of all works of art, a judgement with which Renaissance artists agreed. Many of Michelangelo’s figures are inspired by the muscular dynamism of the statue and subsequent artists approaching this or similar subjects have acknowledged its influence and mastery of the form.

Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra by François Joseph Bosio (1824).

Most depictions of the Lernean Hydra show a kind of dragon creature with multiple heads. Bosio depicts something more like a regular snake, albeit a huge one.

An Athlete Wrestling with a Python by Frederic, Lord Leighton (1877).

The posture of Leighton’s athlete is reminiscent of Bosio’s Hercules but owes more to Michelangelo and the Laocoön. Speculation persists concerning Leighton’s sexuality, a speculation fuelled in part by this statue. He never married despite being extremely wealthy, was a friend of upper class gay men and yet his personal life remains veiled, which is no surprise considering he was President of the Royal Academy and the first (and only) artist to be made a Lord. Have a look at his Daedalus and Icarus and draw your own conclusions.

The Call of Cthulhu (1988).

I placed a rather poorly-rendered copy of Leighton’s statue into one of the panels of The Call of Cthulhu, among a number of other art references. The posture there is repeated at the end of the story when the sailors are attacked by a reawakened monster.

Conan by Margaret Brundage, Weird Tales, August 1934.

Twentieth century art has little room for the figures of myth and legend so it’s been left to genre fiction and the pulps to continue these themes. Margaret Brundage painted many covers for Weird Tales during the magazine’s peak in the Thirties but she was never very good with representations of men. Her depiction of Robert E Howard’s Conan the Barbarian looks rather insipid next to the work of later Conan illustrators such as Roy Krenkel.

Hercules by George Quaintance (1957).

And so the erotic dimension declares itself at last with the work of one of the classic beefcake artists. Quaintance manages to combine elements of the Bosio and Leighton statues while placing them in the context of overtly gay erotica.

Chained by Frank Frazetta; cover to Conan the Usurper by Robert E Howard (1967).

No one ever called Frank Frazetta gay unless they wanted to risk a punch in the mouth. Frazetta is probably the snake attack artist par excellence. He’s also the definitive painter of Conan and the picture above was used on the cover of one of the Lancer reprints which introduced Robert E Howard’s books to a new generation of readers in the late Sixties.

Serpent by Frank Frazetta; cover to Ardor on Argos by Andrew Offutt (1973).

And still they come. This recent (1991) adventure concerning Lester Dent’s pulp hero was painted by Joe DeVito. Bringing things (almost) full circle, the artist has also created a bronze statue based on his picture which looks remarkably like Leighton’s struggling athlete.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• My pastiches
• Fantastic art from Pan Books
• Philip Core and George Quaintance
• The Masks of Medusa
• The art of Giulio Artistide Sartorio, 1860–1932

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #3 (1992).

Following from the post about an art forgery exhibition (and Eddie Campbell discussing his American Gothic cover for Bacchus), I thought I’d post some of my own forgeries, or pastiches as we call them when no deception is intended.

Reverbstorm was the Lord Horror comic series I was creating with David Britton for Savoy in the 1990s. The Modernist techniques of collage (as in the work of Picasso and others) and quotation (as in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land) became themes in themselves as the series developed, so it seemed natural to imitate the styles of various artists as we went along. Pastiche is also a chance to flagrantly show off, of course, and I can’t deny that this was also one of my impulses here.

Issue #3 of Reverbstorm had marauding apes as its theme, from the Rue Morgue to Tarzan and King Kong, so I had the idea of doing an ape cover in the style of the celebrated paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593) which make human heads out of fruit, flowers or animals. Easy enough to have the idea but making it work took a lot of effort and required careful sketching beforehand, something I rarely do. The painting was gouache on board, a medium I’d been using for years and this was about the last gouache work I did before switching to acrylics.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #4 (1994).

Despite admiring Aubrey Beardsley’s work for years, this was the first time I attempted to consciously imitate his style. The end result has never looked all that Beardsley-esque to me (see another attempt below) but it did produce one of my best Lord Horror drawings.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #5 (1994).

Reverbstorm #5 is the Picasso issue and the story switches drawing styles throughout using variations on different periods of Picasso’s career. The cover spread was a riff on Guernica which is a key motif in the series as a whole. This was acrylic on board, with some chopped-up postcards collaged at the top and bottom. You can see James Joyce’s head beside the bull on the left and Lord Horror and Jessie Matthews (based on the interior panel below) on the far right.

Jessie Matthews in Reverbstorm #5.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #6 (1996).

The second Beardsley pastiche with James Joyce, Jessie and Horror in masquerade costumes. The bull and horse from Guernica can be seen stipled into the background. Michael Moorcock included this drawing in the 50th anniversary edition of New Worlds magazine. (The date for this is later than the pictures below since two issues were created out of sequence, a typical piece of Savoy unorthodoxy.)

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #6 (1995).

At the end of issue 6 we see Joyce take a book down from a shelf, The Weird of Spring-Heeled Jack, written by his brother (William Joyce/Lord Horror in this mythology). The book is labelled as being illustrated by Harry Clarke which was my idea when I decided I wanted to do a Clarke pastiche. As with the Arcimboldo painting, having the idea was the easy part, the actual drawing took about two weeks to complete.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #7 (painted 1994; issue appeared 2000).

This painting is an attempt at doing comic artist Burne Hogarth (copying his famous drawing of Tarzan astride a raging lion) in the style of fantasy artist Frank Frazetta and is acrylic on board again. I’d originally put one of my perennial black suns at the top of the picture but amended that later in Photoshop by filling it with the Reverbstorm lightning flash and a flare effect.

Baptised in the Blood of Millions (painted 1997; book published 2001).

When I came to do the cover for David Britton’s third Lord Horror novel he gave me a sketch he wanted reproduced in the style of Frazetta so I went all out with this one and did a big acrylic painting on canvas. The end result is more Frazetta-like than the Reverbstorm cover (it owes a lot to Frazetta’s Bran Mak Morn painting) and also contains some Francis Bacon-like smears which Dave was very pleased with.

The tentacles in this painting have led it to being incorporated in my Lovecraft volume, The Haunter of the Dark, along with a selection of other Lord Horror pieces including the Harry Clarke drawing. Meanwhile Reverbstorm is slowly being reworked as a single volume, other work permitting, although the completion date for that is still some distance away. Naturally, any news about it will be posted here in due course.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• T&H: At the Sign of the Dolphin
• Fantastic art from Pan Books
• Guernica, seventy years on
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

Fantastic Art (1973).
Cover: Earth by Arcimboldo.

I’d thought of writing something about this book series even before I started this weblog since there’s very little information to be found about it online. I can’t compete with the serious Penguin-heads—and I’m not much of a dedicated book collector anyway—but I do have a decent collection of the art books that Pan/Ballantine published in the UK throughout the 1970s. These were published simultaneously by Ballantine/Peacock Press in the US and nearly all were edited by David Larkin, with Betty Ballantine overseeing the American editions. Two of the series, the Dalí and Magritte, were among the first art books I owned. Over the years I’ve gradually accumulated almost the full set and I always look for their distinctive white spines in secondhand shops.

The Pan books were a uniform size, approximately A4 (297 x 210 mm), with a single picture on each recto page and generous margins. The reproductions were excellent, printed on quality paper, and all featured specially-commissioned introductions (Ballard for the Dali book) with those pages printed on textured sheets. Each book was beautifully designed, with the opening pages and introductions often featuring black and white vignettes if the artists in question produced line drawings. Editor Larkin’s focus was on art that tended to the fantastic, visionary or imaginative, something that was in vogue throughout the Seventies after psychedelic art had ransacked the Victorian and Edwardian eras for inspiration a few years earlier. Aubrey Beardsley had been rediscovered in the mid-Sixties (ending up on the cover of Sgt. Pepper) and underground magazines such as Oz and IT helped create a renewed interest in art that would look good when you were stoned or tripping. The Pan books weren’t “head books” as such but its probably fair to say that the series was supported and made possible by that spirit.

Magritte (1972).
Cover: The Son of Man.

As the series developed, the format evolved away from fine art towards contemporary fantasy art, and as a result became less interesting for me, although the success of the Frazetta books undoubtedly meant that this was the way the sales were going. The demand for the Ernst and Rousseau titles can be gauged by the remainder cut-outs on their covers. The final volumes (which I’ve never bought) featured artists such as Brian Froud (The Dark Crystal), Alan Lee (The Lord of the Rings) and others, with their Faeries, Giants, Castles and Gnomes books. I’m still missing a couple of the earlier numbers which I could now order online but that would spoil the game of letting chance deliver the goods, wouldn’t it?

Fantastic Art is easily my favourite, a great collection of visionary work through the ages beginning with Bosch and proceeding through Goya, John Martin, Richard Dadd, the Symbolists and the Surrealists to what was then contemporary work by artists such as Hundertwasser. This was one of the first of the series and seems to be the key volume in the way it provides an overview of the art that would follow.

Dali (1974).
Cover: Raphaelesque Head Exploding.

A great introduction by JG Ballard in this one, replete with the usual phrases about “the dark causeways of our spinal columns”.

Innocent Art (1974).
Cover: Cat by André Duranton.

A collection of what used to be called naive painting, ie: work by unschooled “Sunday painters” such as Rousseau. Outsider art is the preferred term these days even though the work itself hasn’t always changed.

Max Ernst (1975).
Cover: Euclid.

Ernst’s later work in this book was the most abstract and experimental of the series. Europe After the Rain was printed across a fold-out sheet so that its full width could be displayed.

Rousseau (1975).
Cover: The Merry Jesters.

The English Dreamers (1975).
Cover: The Bridesmaid by John Everett Millais.

Arthur Rackham (1975).
Cover: Clerk Colville (from Some British Ballads).

Temptation (1975).
Cover: Ferdinand Lured by Ariel by John Everett Millais.

An unusual collection with a wide range of pictures (Bosch, Alma-Tadema, Balthus). Mainly concerns sexual temptation for female bodies but also includes Biblical and other temptations.

The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta (1975).
Cover: Egyptian Queen.

The book that launched a thousand metal albums. Volume One here was the first attempt to collect Frazetta’s work and was easily the most popular title of the series, going through many reprintings and inspiring three more volumes to follow. Many of the reproductions are superior to their equivalents in the later Icon retrospective collection. This was the first one I bought after the Surrealist books and, while I’ve never been a muscle fan, I couldn’t help but notice all the male flesh on display.

The Fantastic Creatures of Edward Julius Detmold (1976).
Cover: Shere Khan in the jungle (from The Jungle Book).

Charles and William Heath Robinson (1976).
Cover: Elfin Mount (from Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales).

A collection of the Robinsons’ fairy tale paintings. A break from the format with a blue cover.

The Paintings of Carl Larsson (1976).
Cover: The Kitchen.

Another break with the format as the book is printed landscape to suit Larsson’s drawings and paintings. As with the Ernst book, a fold-out page was a special feature.

The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen (1977).
Cover: The Tale of the Third Dervish.

A collection of Nielsen’s work modelled after Turkish and Persian miniatures.

Frank Frazetta, Book Two (1977).
Cover: Dark Kingdom.

Frank Frazetta, Book Three (1978).
Cover painting: Nightwinds.

The Fantastic Art of Sulamith Wülfing (1978).
Cover: The Big Dragon.

Part of the series but published by Fontana/Collins, not Pan.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

A solidly gay day for secondhand books with the discovery of two relatively obscure items by gay artists. Philip Core is probably more well-known as a writer than a painter, author of The Original Eye: Arbiters of Twentieth Century Taste and the masterful Camp: The Lie that Tells the Truth (both 1984 and both out of print, unfortunately). His paintings predominantly feature unclothed men but present these in a far more painterly style than one usually sees from gay artists, the approach too often being a kind of kitsch photo-realism that tends towards soft (or hard) porn. A shame that this volume is rather battered as it seems to be a rare book. Core died of Aids in 1989 but his paintings are still being bought and sold, gay art being one genre that never lacks for an audience.

The Bermuda Triangle by Philip Core (1982).

And speaking of kitsch…. George Quaintance (1902-1957) was a pioneer of a variety of beefcake erotica that isn’t particularly to my taste but which today looks distinctly…quaint? Also distinctly old-fashioned since most of his men have Burt Lancaster quiffs, even the alleged Spartans towelling themselves on this book jacket. The reproductions in the book, an 1989 exhibition catalogue from the Janssen Gallery, Berlin, are all black and white which means that much of the atmosphere of the originals is lost. But it does contain several pages of Quaintance’s magazine covers and period ads for his work.

Siesta by George Quaintance (1952).

Quaintance’s world is a largely female-free dreamscape of perfectly-muscled glamour boys showing their bodies to one another but never doing anything so salacious as kissing. This is a utopia of good clean fun and fifty years ago was more than enough to pack an erotic charge for men starved of homoerotic imagery. From our perspective today it looks rather innocent; even the bulges in their jeans are restrained by comparison with the later excesses of Tom of Finland. All the stereotypes from magazines like Physique Pictorial (which featured Quaintance’s work) are in place: cowboys, sailors, matadors, historical scenes of masters and slaves. Quaintance adopts the same tricks as Weird Tales cover artist Margaret Brundage, showing us as much naked flesh as possible but always ensuring that a shadow, wisp of smoke or trail of cloth falls across the forbidden area (this also ensures that your eye is drawn to that very place). Many of his scenes could almost be masculine versions of Brundage’s often vague illustrations for the pulps, a number of which caused a stir among the fantasy readers of the Thirties with their lesbian-inflected displays of bondage and whippings. Quaintance has an equivalent series of pictures showing naked men valiantly struggling with serpents or demons in scenes reminiscent of the superior (if robustly heterosexual) Frank Frazetta.

Hercules by George Quaintance (1957).

Unlike Philip Core, Quaintance is well-represented on the web. And should you require it, Taschen reprinted the whole run of Physique Pictorial.

• Official A Quaintance site
• A gallery of Quaintance art
• George Quaintance at GLBTQ.com

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Pastor Ted claims to have the ear of the White House and has been very vocal in the past about the iniquities of gay sex. Here’s a random sample from the NAE website:

May 17, 2004

A Special Message From Pastor Ted Haggard, President

Today, homosexual couples are marrying in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The crisis concerning marriage is now a real and present danger to our society. Join with the National Association of Evangelicals for an important 90-minute Church Communication Network (CCN) broadcast this Sunday evening, May 23rd, 6:00-7:30 PM Mountain Daylight Time. Hear some of the nation’s leading experts on the crisis of homosexual marriage and its detrimental impact on America’s families — Dr. James Dobson, Chuck Colson, Bishop Wellington Boone and Tony Perkins — as they inform, educate, and call the Church to action.

Business-as-usual, in the world of the god-botherers, and there’s more of the same drivel here. But Pastor Ted has gone beyond mere preaching in the past, as this eye-popping Harper’s article reveals:

Pastor Ted soon began upsetting the devil’s plans. He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church; his whole congregation pitched itself into invisible battles with demonic forces, sometimes in front of public buildings.

Seems like the sinful gay men may have done some inviting of their own. Then there’s this:

He called the evil forces that dominated Colorado Springs—and every other metropolitan area in the country—”Control.”

Sometimes, he says, Control would call him late on Saturday night, threatening to kill him. “Any more impertinence out of you, Ted Haggard,” he claims Control once told him, “and there will be unrelenting pandemonium in this city.”

This may be coincidence, but any reader of William Burroughs’ work will tell you that Burroughs patented the term “Control” as a name for abstract forces (human or otherwise) attempting to dominate the world. Burroughs’ work, of course, contains a lot of gay sex, often used as a means of combating that same Control.

The Harper’s article has a great description of Haggard’s World Prayer Center:

The angel’s pedestal stands at the center of a great, eight-pointed compass laid out in muted red, white, and blue-black stone. Each point directs the eye to a contemporary painting, most depicting gorgeous, muscular men—one is a blacksmith, another is bound, fetish-style, in chains—in various states of undress. My favorite is The Vessel, by Thomas Blackshear (above), a major figure in the evangelical-art world. Here in the World Prayer Center is a print of The Vessel, a tall, vertical panel of two nude, ample-breasted, white female angels team-pouring an urn of honey onto the shaved head of a naked, olive-skinned man below. The honey drips down over his slab-like pecs and his six-pack abs into the eponymous vessel, which he holds in front of his crotch. But the vessel can’t handle that much honey, so the sweetness oozes over the edges and spills down yet another level, presumably onto our heads, drenching us in golden, godly love. Part of what makes Blackshear’s work so compelling is precisely its unabashed eroticism; it aims to turn you on, and then to turn that passion toward Jesus.

In fairness to the artist, I think that’s supposed to be annointing oil they’re pouring. Blackshear’s paintings are certainly preferable to the dreadful figurines on his site, the kind of things that give kitsch a bad name. His eroticism is of the unspecified variety that one sees in Frank Frazetta’s work and which was also present in the fascist sculptures that Arno Breker produced for the Nazis. Breker was gay but Hitler managed to overlook that inconvenience, just as the evangelicals probably overlook the ambiguous qualities in Blackshear’s paintings. As Kenneth Clark says in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, all nude art is erotic. Or maybe that’s just “Control” speaking through us lousy perverts?

To return to Pastor Ted, I’m curious now to see how the “gay is a lifestyle choice” contingent deal with this one. The wingnuts who deny a biological component to gay attraction are going to have to accept that their noble leader willingly entered into a sinful relationship rather than being driven there by even the slightest genetic impulse. In Colorado at the moment it seems that Control has the upper hand.

Update: latest news is that Pastor Ted bought crystal meth (an addictive compound very popular among gay men when used during sex) out of curiosity. More than once. At $100 a shot. That’s an expensive curiosity habit you have there, Ted. Oh and the escort gave him a massage but they didn’t have sex, no sir. The current Congressman for Colorado is the egregious Marilyn Musgrave, a woman who recently made Rolling Stone’s list of “10 Worst Congressmen“, and “an evangelical Christian who married her Bible-camp sweetheart”. Marilyn is down on the gay in a big way:

Once in Congress, Musgrave introduced a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage — which she calls “the most important issue that we face today” — nearly a year before a Massachusetts court approved civil unions. “She doesn’t like the idea of one gay person,” says Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts. “So obviously the idea of two of us hanging out makes her very unhappy.” For her opposition to gay marriage — as well as her push to legalize concealed weapons — Musgrave received an endorsement from the KKK in May.

I wonder what she has to say about Pastor Ted’s curiosities?

And there’s more from the party of gay hate, with the news that the Republican National Committee has accepted donations from the president of a gay porn distribution company, Marina Pacific Distributors. I think this is what’s called sending a confusing message to the voters. Coming next (as it were), President Bush is caught being fellated by a chimpanzee in the Oval Office. Maybe.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The election Google Bomb
• Why doesn’t America believe in evolution?