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 very often. Salvador Dalí’s set of engravings for a 1934 edition were appended last year to a new English translation by RJ Dent for Solar Books. And from French publisher La Baconniere there’s this recent edition with a set of fresh illustrations by TagliaMani (also here).
Tag: René Magritte
René Magritte by David Wheatley
René Magritte as portrayed by Patrick McDonnell.
René Magritte died in 1967, the year Eric Duvivier’s La femme 100 têtes appeared in French cinemas. Magritte is even less visible cinematically than Max Ernst, IMDB lists a couple of documentaries and nothing else. There are trace elements elsewhere, notably the Magritte and de Chirico influence in Bertolucci’s Borges’ adaptation The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), but the artist’s arresting visual imagination has always found more of a welcome on book covers than cinema screens.
One exception is David Wheatley’s drama documentary René Magritte (1976), yet another work you won’t find listed at IMDB. This was Wheatley’s graduation film which the BBC screened in a 30-minute version (shorn of some apparently clunky dialogue scenes) in 1979, and which secured for Wheatley a place as a regular director for the BBC’s Omnibus and Arena arts programmes. I saw the 1979 broadcast, and caught it again a decade later when one of the channels was having a season of Magritte-related programming, something that’s impossible to imagine in today’s debased television landscape.
For a student film it’s a stunning piece of work, taking a similar approach to Eric Duvivier in bringing to life many of the artist’s more famous pictures: a window shatters to reveal the scene behind it painted on its panes, a mountain hovers ponderously over the sea, a dove made of clouds flies across a stormy sky. Between the artworks there are short biographical scenes. There’s a sole version of the film on YouTube that remains watchable despite being a low-quality recording from video tape that’s also hacked into three parts and subtitled in Danish.
Looking for more information about David Wheatley it was dismaying to find he’d died in 2009, aged 59. Leslie Megahey—a cult TV director of mine—wrote an obituary for the Guardian where he describes some of Wheatley’s other productions including the Arena film Borges and I (1983)—as far as I’m aware the only British TV documentary about Jorge Luis Borges—and Wheatley’s first feature film, an adaptation of Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1987). I recall enjoying the latter, produced at a time when the success of The Company of Wolves (1984) made it seem there might also be a place in the cinema for Angela Carter’s imagination; we know how that worked out. The Magic Toyshop doesn’t seem to have had a DVD release so good luck to anyone searching for it. As for René Magritte, if anyone runs across a better online copy be sure to leave a comment.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Public Voice by Lejf Marcussen
Alice in Liverpool
Alice and the Caterpillar (1865) by John Tenniel.
It’s perhaps surprising that an art gallery, rather than a library, is holding a huge survey exhibition about Alice, but then Carroll’s creation has been and still is the inspiration of artists, photographers, theatrical designers, animators, film-makers.
Thus Marina Warner writing about an exhibition of art based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice books opening at Tate Liverpool this Friday:
Alice in Wonderland will offer visitors a rare opportunity to view Carroll’s own drawings and photographs, alongside Victorian Alice memorabilia and John Tenniel’s preliminary drawings for the first edition of the novel.
Carroll’s stories were soon adopted by other artists. Surrealist artists from the 1930s onwards were drawn towards the fantastical world of Wonderland where natural laws were suspended. From the 1960s through the 1970s, Carroll’s Alice tales also prompted conceptual artists to explore language and its relationship to perception, and the stories inspired further responses in Pop and Psychedelic art. Expect to see works by artists ranging from Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, to Peter Blake and Yayoi Kusama. (more)
The exhibition runs to January 29th, 2012, and I suppose this gives me a convenient opportunity to point again to my psychedelic Alice calendars which have been updated for the forthcoming year.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Coulthart calendars for 2012
• Scenes from a carriage
• Through the Psychedelic Looking-Glass: the 2011 calendar
• Jabberwocky
• Alice in Acidland
• Return to Wonderland
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Virtual Alice
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The Illustrators of Alice
John Holmes, 1935–2011
(1974).
Artist John Holmes, whose obituary was published this week, had a style that was immediately recognisable from the many paintings featured on book covers (and a few record sleeves) in the 1970s and 1980s. His painting for The Female Eunuch is by far the most well-known, of course, although I often used to wonder how many people who knew the picture could have named the artist responsible. Holmes’ art brought a touch of Magritte-like Surrealism to cover illustration (at times the debt to Magritte was quite overt), and his images are familiar to anyone in the UK who was reading science fiction or horror during the 70s. He also has the distinction of being the first artist to provide a cover for an M. John Harrison book with the painting for Harrison’s debut novel, The Committed Men, in 1971. (Or not quite… See comments.)
The McNeill Gallery has some original work for sale while the artist himself talked about some of his cover art at All Things Horror.
(1974).
(1981).
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive
• The book covers archive
Weekend links 64
The Sixteenth of September (1956) by René Magritte.
To Magritte admirers, The Sixteenth of September is a deceptively realistic work painted in 1956, one of a series in which the artist plays tricks with light and time of day. It shows a crescent moon impossibly shining through the dark mass of a tree, against a dawn sky.
To [Marc] Bolan fans, the painting has an entirely different significance: 16 September 1977 was the date the singer was returning home in the small hours from a night out, in a Mini driven by his girlfriend Gloria Jones. […] Fans say the tree in the painting closely resembles the sycamore the car crashed into, and the moon was at the same phase on 16 September 1977. (more)
• New Yorkers finally got a successful vote for gay marriage making New York state the sixth and largest in the US giving full marriage rights to its gay citizens. One of America’s conservative journals, National Review, made the striking point that forty years ago New York was in the vanguard of gay liberation while Spain under Franco was a dictatorship with no gay rights at all. No one then would have bet on Spain beating New York to gay marriage rights as it did in 2005. Allow me to note that we still only have civil unions here in the UK.
• Related: Queer Beacon: LGBT spaces in New York City by Kian Goh, and at Scientific American: The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Natural Selection and Evolution, with a Key to Many Complicating Factors by Jeremy Yoder.
• A pair of intrepid photographers breach the midnight security at St Paul’s Cathedral to bring back photos of the building rooftop. Related (and looking like a good location for a British equivalent of Stalker), photos of the disused Thorpe Marsh Power Station, Yorkshire.
• Mixtape of the month: the ATP I’ll Be Your Mirror collection by Portishead, a great blend of rock, rap and electronic odds-and-ends. Also a dash of Alan Moore & Stephen O’Malley.
• Eddie Campbell is blogging again. Welcome back to the madhouse, Eddie. His smart and witty daughter, Hayley Campbell, continues to file regular bulletins from her London bunker.
• Your Tumblrs this week: Fuck Yeah Ken Russell and Fuck Yeah Powell & Pressburger.
• Robot Flâneur: Exploring Google Street View.
• Paris Visages by Marco Gervasio.
• Written On The Forehead (2011) by PJ Harvey.