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• • • Being a journal by artist and designer John Coulthart, cataloguing interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms.

Archive for the ‘Max Ernst’ tag

 

The eyes of Odilon Redon

L’Oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l’infini from A Edgar Poe (1882).
Another decently thorough Symbolist website covers the life and work of Odilon Redon (1840–1916), an artist whose pastels and prints were strange even by the standards of his contemporaries. His giant eyeballs and other floating figures are always startling and point the [...]

Posted in {art}, {black and white}, {books}, {fantasy}, {film}, {horror}, {illustrators}, {lovecraft}, {surrealism}, {symbolists} | 2 comments »

 


Max (The Birdman) Ernst

Max (The Birdman) Ernst (1967).
Psychedelia is never far away here at { feuilleton }. Yesterday’s film poster reminded me of this work from the psychedelic era by Martin Sharp, an Australian artist who moved to London and became closely-associated with Oz magazine and London’s other leading psych poster designers, Michael English and Nigel Waymouth, aka [...]

Posted in {art}, {design}, {film}, {music}, {psychedelia}, {surrealism} | 13 comments »

 


The Robing of The Birds

Yet another of those curious Eastern European film posters which, to our Hollywood-colonised eyes, seem to violate all the conventions of cinema marketing. This example is a painting by Josef Vyletal for a 1970 Czech release of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Surrealist art enthusiasts will immediately identify the floating figures as being cut loose from [...]

Posted in {art}, {design}, {film}, {painting}, {surrealism} | 4 comments »

 


Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos

Unveiling another new piece of work, this is a T-shirt design for metal band Cyaegha whose Steps of Descent album I illustrated and designed last year. They asked for something based on HP Lovecraft’s god Nyarlathotep so I thought I’d take the opportunity to rework from scratch the version of this I created in 1999 [...]

Posted in {art}, {design}, {horror}, {lovecraft}, {music}, {surrealism}, {work} | 9 comments »

 


Ballard and the painters

Jours de Lenteur (1937) by Yves Tanguy.
Behind it, the ark of his covenant, stood two photographs in a hinged blackwood frame. On the left was a snapshot of himself at the age of four, sitting on a lawn between his parents before their divorce. On the right, exorcizing this memory, was a faded reproduction of [...]

Posted in {art}, {painting}, {science fiction}, {surrealism}, {symbolists} | 9 comments »

 


JG Ballard, 1930–2009

Panther Books paperback edition, 1968; cover painting: The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst.
If I can’t remember when I first encountered JG Ballard’s work, it’s not because I was reading him at a very early age, more that a childhood enthusiasm for science fiction made his books as omnipresent in my early life as any [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {borges}, {burroughs}, {painting}, {science fiction}, {surrealism} | 13 comments »

 


The faces of Parsifal

Parsifal by Jean Delville (1890).
Continuing the occasional series of posts examining the evolution of a particular design or image, this one begins with a mystical charcoal drawing by Belgian Symbolist, Jean Delville (1867–1953), our object of concern being that entranced or dreaming face.
My first encounter with Delville’s image wasn’t via the original but came with [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {comics}, {fantasy}, {horror}, {illustrators}, {lovecraft}, {painting}, {psychedelia}, {symbolists} | 4 comments »

 


Mark Beard’s artistic circle

The Fencing Team by Bruce Sargeant.
Artists in the 20th century used to be multifarious in their activities, often taking their work through different stages or periods of evolution; Picasso and Max Ernst are two good examples of this. In today’s inflated art market this is no longer a wise move. As Brian Eno has [...]

Posted in {art}, {gay}, {painting}, {sculpture} | 4 comments »

 


Against Nature: The hybrid forms of modern sculpture

left: Morgan Le Fay by Roche Pierre (1904).
right: The Rock Drill by Jacob Epstein (1913–14).
An exhibition of ‘fantastic’ sculpture opened at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds last week with some fascinating juxtapositions, ranging from Fernand Khnopff’s Mask to Jacob Epstein’s marvellous Rock Drill which is more commonly one of the landmarks of the Tate [...]

Posted in {art}, {fantasy}, {sculpture}, {symbolists} | 6 comments »

 


Judex, from Feuillade to Franju

Monsieur Wiley in yesterday’s comments reminded me of George Franju’s seldom seen Judex, a 1963 film based on the Feuillade serials of the same name. Louis Feuillade (1873–1925), as you really ought to know by now, was the director of the original Fantômas serials (1913–14) and also Les Vampires (1915–16), obvious forerunners of Diabolik with [...]

Posted in {film}, {horror}, {pulp}, {surrealism} | 4 comments »

 


Fantastic art from Pan Books

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 [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {design}, {fantasy}, {illustrators}, {painting}, {surrealism}, {symbolists} | 12 comments »

 


Penguin Surrealism

Design by Germano Facetti with a detail from Europe after the Rain by Max Ernst.
Is this the start of a new meme? Ace Jet 170 features a number of posts about the history of Penguin and Pelican book cover design. (I won’t link to any specific page as the site is full of other [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {design}, {painting}, {science fiction}, {surrealism} | 11 comments »

 


The art of Bertrand

The first question has to be “Bertrand who?” but you won’t receive an answer here since information is scarce (see below). Bertrand’s erotic surrealism first appeared in the late Sixties, going by the dates in collections of his work. Some of his paintings and drawings crept into the underground mags of the period then turned [...]

Posted in {art}, {black and white}, {books}, {burroughs}, {fantasy}, {painting}, {surrealism} | 20 comments »

 


L’Amour Fou: Surrealism and Design

Cadeau Audace by Man Ray (1921).

L’amour fou
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.
Robert Hughes
The Guardian, Saturday March 24th, 2007
THE VICTORIA AND Albert’s big show for this year, Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, is—well, maybe we don’t much [...]

Posted in {art}, {decadence}, {design}, {fashion}, {painting}, {sculpture}, {surrealism} | 6 comments »

 


The Illustrators of Alice

Latest book purchase is this large format volume from 1972, one of a number of interesting art books produced by Academy Editions in the early seventies. I also have their monographs on Odilon Redon, “insane” painter Richard Dadd, and their collection of Félicien Rops‘ pornographic and “Satanist” drawings which remains one of the few Rops [...]

Posted in {art}, {black and white}, {books}, {fantasy}, {illustrators}, {symbolists} | 7 comments »

 


The Surrealist Revolution

The riddle of the rocks
It was the art movement that shocked the world. It was sexy, weird and dangerous—and it’s still hugely influential today. Jonathan Jones travels to the coast of Spain to explore the landscape that inspired Salvador Dalí, the greatest surrealist of them all.
Jonathan Jones
Monday March 5, 2007
The Guardian
I AM SCRAMBLING over the [...]

Posted in {art}, {film}, {painting}, {sculpture}, {surrealism} | 6 comments »

 


The art of Rudolf Hausner, 1914–1995

Die Arche des Odysseus (1948–1956).

Adam Bei Sich (1969).
A major Austrian painter and printmaker, Rudolf Hausner studied art at the Academy in Vienna from 1931 to 1936, under Fahringer and Sterrer. Many of his early paintings were confiscated and branded as ‘degenerate’ by the ruling Nazi party in 1938. In 1941 Hausner was drafted by the [...]

Posted in {art}, {fantasy}, {painting}, {surrealism} | 4 comments »

 


Surrealist women

Was the Surrealist movement the first art grouping to give female creators more of an equivalent status to their male counterparts? The recent posting about Leonora Carrington had me considering this question again (yes, this is what taxes my brain while it’s awake). The answer isn’t so easy to find since women artists had been [...]

Posted in {art}, {painting}, {surrealism} | 5 comments »

 


Leonora Carrington

The Guardian profiles the wonderful Leonora Carrington, one of the last of the original Surrealists. There’s little excuse for the Tate’s neglect as recounted below, Marina Warner has championed her work for years and she was the subject of a TV documentary in the BBC’s Omnibus strand in the 1990s. Maybe the Tate curators should [...]

Posted in {art}, {painting}, {surrealism} | 2 comments »

 


JG Ballard book covers

In a similar vein to the Burroughs cover gallery, Rick McGrath’s site does the same for one of Burroughs’ followers, JG Ballard. The covers below are two typical examples using Surrealist art as their illustration, The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst and City of Drawers by Dalí. I’ve always loved the pairing of Ernst’s [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {design}, {illustrators}, {painting}, {science fiction}, {surrealism} | 3 comments »

 


 

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