This is more like it. In 2008 when I posted one of Jacques Houplain’s etchings for a 1947 edition of Les Chants de Maldoror there were none of the other pictures in the series to be found. Now there’s a website devoted to Houplain’s work which features a page of his Maldoror illustrations. There’s a […]
Les Fleurs du Mal. That favourite novel of the Surrealists receives the attention of yet another Surrealist artist. Dalí and Magritte both made their own attempts to illustrate Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, a book that many people would consider beyond the reach of easy pictorial representation. I tend to think that the novel’s delirious, […]
27 minutes of experimental video from 1977 in which director Shûji Terayama retrieves some predictably unorthodox images from the bottomless pit of Lautréamont’s text. The preoccupations here seem to belong as much to the director’s mind as to that of Isidore Ducasse, what with the emphasis on various forms of bondage and unusual erotics. (Not […]
Sepia (no date) by Gao Jianfu. Quelquefois, dans une nuit d’orage, pendant que des légions de poulpes ailés, ressemblant de loin à des corbeaux, planent au-dessus des nuages, en se dirigeant d’une rame raide vers les cités des humains, avec la mission de les avertir de changer de conduite, le caillou, à l’œil sombre, voit […]
Ulysses (1934), designed by Ernst Reichl; Complete Works of Isidore Ducasse (1967), designed by Pierre Faucheux. On the design front, that is, not the writing one. Ernst Reichl’s design for the 1934 Random House edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (the first US edition) has a cover which isn’t so different to the many Art Deco-style […]
Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror continues to provoke attempts at visual illustration. B. Oliver-White’s brief Super-8 film borrows some text from the Fourth Canto which is complemented by vague and grainy shots resembling outtakes from Eraserhead. Given the difficulties of fixing Maldoror‘s shifting terrain this seems a better approach than more literal depictions. Watch it […]
Artist Nick Kushner writes to alert me that his 2010 painting Maldoror: Satan Seated Upon His Throne has been used on the cover of a recent Russian edition of Lautréamont’s novel. Kushner uses his own blood to create his paintings, and the cover below has been created using the same material. Maldoror himself would no […]
Reverbstorm: 1994–2012. Art, intellectual pursuits, the development of the natural sciences, many branches of scholarship flourished in close spacial, temporal proximity to massacre and the death camps. It is the structure and meaning of that proximity that must be looked at. […] But there is a [...] danger. Not only is the relevant material vast […]
Seen briefly in yesterday’s film about René Magritte were some of the artist’s 77 illustrations created for a 1948 edition of Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror published by Éditions “La Boetie”, Brussels. The examples here are from various auction sites, and they can’t be counted among Magritte’s best work which probably explains why they’re not reproduced […]
From a late Surrealist to an early one. Jindrich Styrsky is a Czech artist best remembered today for his collages but he was also a painter, a photographer and a publisher of erotic material. He illustrated and published a Czech edition of Lautréamont’s Maldoror, and helped found the Surrealismus review in Prague. The Bathe (1934). […]
Black Cat on a Chair (1850–1860) by Andrew L Von Wittkamp. • “A little bit of acid, lots of weed, and too much Castaneda and I was ready to move from the magical realm of Middle Earth into a world that was much stranger than any involving hairy dwarves and white wizards…” Too Much to […]
Empusae Raptus (1977). Another post about this astonishing artist (I’ll keep talking about her if no one else does…). The pictures here are taken from the catalogue for the 2010 Sibylle Ruppert exhibition at the HR Giger Museum, Gruyères, Switzerland. Leslie Barany was good enough to send me a copy of this, and the pictures […]
La Bible du mal (1978). Another painter gone, and a really extraordinary one at that. I wrote something about German artist Sibylle Ruppert two years ago, and only heard about her death this week following an email from Leslie Barany of Barany Artists. Leslie also sent copies of recent exhibition material from a Ruppert show […]
Marian Bantjes designs the cover of the latest Creative Review and there’s a feature about her work inside. • “…the question: ‘was Shakespeare gay?’ strikes me as so daft as to be barely worth answering. Of course he was. Arguably he was bisexual, of sorts, but his heart was never on his straight side.” Don […]
“The Go-Go wonder of Paris — That’s space girl. Transistors never wear down, they just go on and on — Even her heart is made of vinyl — It’s a marvy life — With nothing else to do but dance — Why not? – Love? — Forget it, baby — Not for her —” From […]
Calling this 1927 edition “illustrated” perhaps stretches the point seeing as Frans De Geetere’s illustrations are rather more minimal and restrained than you’d expect for Lautréamont’s proto-Surrealist masterwork. The Koopman Collection’s page for this book lists 65 Geetere’s etchings but only shows a handful. I’d like to see more of these even if the samples […]
Hommage à KS. The web isn’t the best place to see works by this extraordinary German artist, most of what’s available tends to be tiny thumbnails which give no impression of the detail in her drawings and paintings. Ruppert is another artist who’s been brave enough to try illustrating Lautréamont’s Maldoror but I’ve yet to […]
Les Chants de Maldoror by Corominas (2007). There seems to be no escaping from HP Lovecraft just now, the illustration above having been created for a PDF publication entitled CTHULHU, Cómics y relatos de ficción oscura, produced by these people. The Cthulhu-zine seems to be unavailable but you can see more of these splendid illustrations, […]
The Frog with Rabbit Ears (1891). La matière de l’étrange, an exhibition of ceramic grotesques by Jean Carriès is currently running at the Petit Palais, Paris, through to January 27th, 2008. Carriès doesn’t feature in any of my books about eccentric or fantastic artists which I find surprising, his work is very peculiar by 19th […]
Cadeau Audace by Man Ray (1921). L’amour fou by Robert Hughes Fur teacups, wheelbarrow chairs, lip-shaped sofas … the fashion, furniture and jewellery created by the Surrealists were useless, unique, decadent and, above all, very sexy. The Guardian, Saturday March 24th, 2007 THE VICTORIA AND Albert’s big show for this year, Surreal Things: Surrealism and […]
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