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Satan (1833).
I always enjoy it when a search for a piece of information about an artist leads to works you hadn’t come across before. Today it was a quest for the identity of the Satan statue above, created, as it turns out, by French sculptor Jean-Jacques Feuchère (1807–1852). The Louvre site has another view of [...]

Nearly two years after their American release, and not a moment too soon, the films which comprise Kenneth Anger’s superb Magick Lantern Cycle turn up at last in the UK. Good to see these being produced by the BFI, their previous collections of shorts by the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer are distinguished by quality [...]

Patrick McGoohan as Number Six.
“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”
The Prisoner, which ran for seventeen episodes from 1967 to 1968, was the best original drama series there’s ever been on television. Period, as Harlan Ellison would say. Best because it grabbed the format of [...]

Previous posts about fantastic, surreal or visionary artists.

• The art of Jim Leon, 1938–2002

• Surrealist echoes

• The art of Laurie Hogin

• The art of Christian rex Van Minnen

• Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism

• The art of Oleg Denysenko

• The art of François Schuiten

• The art of Sibylle Ruppert

• The eyes of Odilon Redon

• [...]

Previous posts about etchings and engravings.

• Frans De Geetere’s illustrated Maldoror

• Schott’s Physica Curiosa

• Grandville’s Un Autre Monde

• The Triumph of the Phallus

• The art of Oleg Denysenko

• Nicoletto Giganti’s naked duellists

• Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales

• Jan Saenredam’s whale

• Digital alchemy

• Oeuvres D’Architecture by Jean Le Pautre

• Gramato-graphices

• Edward William Lane’s Arabian Nights [...]

The first part of Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle appeared on DVD in a splendid edition from Fantoma earlier this year. The second and final part is due for release on October 2nd and you can see the mouthwatering trailer here.
This new set includes the Cocteau-esque Harlequinade, Rabbit’s Moon (1950); homoerotica, bikers and rock’n’roll in [...]

Lindsay Anderson’s masterpiece, If…., is finally given a DVD release in the UK in June. Anderson’s film—about the dramatic resistance to authority of three boys at an unnamed British school—was made in 1968 but I didn’t get to see it until (as I recall) 1977. I was 15 at the time and feeling increasingly desperate [...]

The Treasures of Satan by Jean Delville (1894).
Some more favourite paintings today. Jean Delville produced a splendidly strange portrayal of Satan as an undersea monarch lording it over a sprawl of intoxicated, naked figures. When Savoy Books decided to put together the definitive version of David Lindsay’s equally strange fantasy novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, [...]

Lucifer (no date).
…I find nothing fantastic in so-called fantastic art, it is an aspect of reality in search of sanity beyond the normal bounds. I believe that fantastic art is related to the protective dream, that it prolongs the healing dream and finds symbols that change dread into wonder, strangeness and beauty.
As in all figurative [...]

Left: Comets on Fire at the Arthurfest,
Los Angeles, 2005.
Bassoons, flamenco, monks’ cowls…
welcome to the new rock underground
Julian Cope explains why heavy metal, so often maligned, is at the heart of today’s rock avant-garde
Julian Cope
Friday August 18, 2006
The Guardian
IN APRIL THIS YEAR, after my half-hour stint as a guest vocalist for the US doom metal band [...]