{ feuilleton }

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 [...]

“It had not been able to support the dazzling splendour imposed on it…”
It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged [...]

In honour of the great news that a print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has been discovered containing scenes long-believed to have been lost, here’s a link to my favourite Guy Maddin film, The Heart of the World. Maddin’s short is six minutes of frenetic genius which references Metropolis in passing although it owes far more [...]

Previous posts about fantastic, surreal or visionary artists.

• The art of Oleg Denysenko

• The art of François Schuiten

• The eyes of Odilon Redon

• Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists

• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009

• The art of Boris Indrikov

• The art of Mati Klarwein, 1932–2002

• The art of Pierre Clayette, 1930–2005

• The monstrous tome

• A Midsummer Night’s [...]

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 [...]