…or Indian palaces have the best doorways. These are from the City Palace, Jaipur, also home to what is claimed to be the world’s largest silver object.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jaipur Observatory panoramas
• The Jantar Mantar

Peacock and Peahen (18th c.).

I’ve had an untitled Japanese painting of a peacock as a desktop image for a while now, its origin forgotten, and I’ve wondered a few times who the artist was. A recent posting about Maruyama Okyo (1733–1795) at Bajo el Signo de Libra made me think that Okyo might be the artist responsible. As it turns out, he wasn’t, my bird is by one of his pupils, Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754–1799), and looks like a copy of the picture below. Mystery solved anyway, and the search gives me a good excuse to link to some of Okyo paintings. These differed from the prevailing style of the period, Okyo having studied Western artists and their methods in order to produce work which was more realistic than that of his contemporaries.

Peony and Peacocks (1781).

• A realist and an eccentric | Okyo and Rosetsu profiled.

Peacock (no date).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Louis Rhead’s peacocks
• The White Peacock
• Peacocks
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Beardsley’s Salomé

Moon Maiden (1910).

Goble’s Moon Maiden, an illustration from Green Willow and Other Japanese Fairy Tales, is proof that a peacock train needn’t be the sole preserve of masculine birds, but then Ruth St Denis had already shown us that. Art Passions has a decent selection of Goble’s fairy pictures although if you want to see the full complement of drawings made for these books you need to consult Archive.org. As usual with illustrators of this period, I find I prefer many of the black-and-white works over the paintings; Art Passions doesn’t have any of those, unfortunately, while the book scans are too low-res to do them justice. Once again, Bud Plant provides an overview of the artist’s career.

Sea-Nymphs – Ding-Dong, Bell (1920).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ruth St Denis

I’ll be Your Mirror (2005).

Not quite finished with the Moon since it’s visible in the background of Juliet Jacobson’s beautiful drawing, together with some other items of recurrent {feuilleton} concern: masturbating males, peacock feathers and human skulls. Pam at Phantasmaphile has a larger copy of this work while Ms Jacobson’s site has a number of equally luscious pencil drawings.

Another fine reader recommendation (thanks Thom!). No provenance for this so as usual if anyone knows the source, please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Winged things
• Dimitris Yeros

Feathers maketh the man, extra points if they’re peacock feathers. I’ve been unable to find a photographer or model credit for this picture, unfortunately (if anyone knows, please leave a comment), but it comes from He Said, He Said via Fabulon. The winged boy below is creditable, however, being one Lyle Lodwick photographed by Tyler Riggs for Contributing Editor.

“For A Definition Of The Nude”.

After yesterday’s post I can’t resist repeating something seen at Fabulon, Thombeau and I both being cock fans (so to speak). Dimitris Yeros is a Greek artist and photographer whose site features a series of studies of male and female nudes juxtaposed with a variety of animals. This isn’t the only peacock photo, there’s also a female portrait and, in one of the other sections, that recurrent object of obsession, a naked man with a sword. As well as photography, Yeros presents examples of his very distinctive paintings.

While we’re on the subject of masculine eye candy, I’ve been enjoying some of the discoveries at Homotography (”Photography with homosexual tendencies”) not least their recent interview with Exterface, French masters of luscious homoerotica.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exterface

La femme au paon (Woman with peacocks): from L’Estampe Moderne (1897).

Two works by British Art Nouveau poster artist and illustrator, Louis Rhead (1858–1926). The first of these is very typical and resembles many of his magazine covers of the period. The cover illustration for The Century, meanwhile, must count as the only time I’ve seen a peacock presented as a possible Christmas dish.

The Century Christmas Number (December 1894).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peacocks
• Rene Beauclair
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Beardsley’s Salomé

The White Peacock (1910).

A typical piece of mysterious erotica by Austrian illustrator and pornographer Franz von Bayros (1866–1924). Like all good Decadents, Bayros used peacocks and peacock feathers as decorative motifs in his pictures but this is the first I’ve seen where the peacock itself is the result of amorous attention. If that sounds overly-perverse, you haven’t seen his Sweet Snail.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kafka’s porn unveiled
• The art of ejaculation
• The art of Félicien Rops, 1833–1898

I missed posting something about Strapped: The Art of the Decorated Jockstrap while the exhibition was running last month at the London College of Communications but better late than never with this. Designer Colin Corbett’s playful additions to the humble jockstrap hit so many spots of obsession it’s like he read my mind: black clothes, swords, peacocks, jockstraps… You can see more of them here and he talks about some of the designs here.

Dennis Covey, meanwhile, turns jockstraps into art by making unique torso casts of their wearers. He also has a fine collection of other homoerotic work, most of which is for sale.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Game boy

The Peacock (no date).

Dancer Ruth St Denis (1879–1968) strikes Art Nouveau poses in the New York Public Library’s Denishawn Collection, now at Flickr.

Radha (1904).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peacocks
• Rene Beauclair
• Elizabetes Iela 10b, Riga
• The Maison Lavirotte
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• The art of Hernan Gimenez
• Images of Nijinsky

A posting of Dugald Stewart Walker’s work this week at the always excellent Golden Age Comic Book Stories sent me back again to Archive.org to see if there might be further examples among their collection of scanned library books. Sure enough there’s not only a copy of the book which GACBS sampled from, Padraic Colum’s The Girl Who Sat By The Ashes, but also other fairy tale collections by Colum, including the one featured here, The Boy Who Knew What the Birds Said (1918). Colum is well-represented in Archive.org’s American Library section and many of his titles seem to be at least partly illustrated. A cursory glance at some of the others turned up his retelling of Greek myths illustrated by Willy Pogàny.

I’m not as keen on Walker’s work as I am other artists of this period—he has a tendency to give his adult characters gnome-like features—but the line work and compositions are first class. The Boy Who Knew What the Birds Said is especially nice for its many peacock details, some of which are featured below.

left: Bloom-of-Youth and the Witch of the Elders; right: What the Peacock and the Crow Told Each Other.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peacocks
• Willy Pogàny’s Parsifal

The Modern Poster by Will Bradley (1895).

A selection from the NYPL Digital Gallery. There’s more by the great Will Bradley (1868–1962) here.

Abstract design based on peacock feathers by Maurice Verneuil (1900?).

Pavo; Lophophorus (1834–1837).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Rene Beauclair
• Elizabetes Iela 10b, Riga
• The Maison Lavirotte
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Beardsley’s Salomé

Dilettantes by You Am I (2008). Illustration and design by Ken Taylor.

Dilettantes is the eighth studio album from Australian band You Am I which is released this week sporting a very creditable Beardsley pastiche by illustrator Ken Taylor. Sleevage has more details about the creation of the CD package, including preliminary sketches. Those familiar with Beardsley’s work may see in the cover drawing references to The Peacock Skirt and the colour print of Isolde. I like the way Beardsley’s peacock has been exchanged for a more suitably antipodean lyrebird. This isn’t Beardsley’s only influence in the musical world, of course. A few more examples follow.

left: The Peacock Skirt from Salomé (1893); right: Isolde (1895).

Revolver cover by Klaus Voorman (1966).

The over-familiarity of Klaus Voorman’s collage/drawing for the cover of Revolver by The Beatles tends to obscure its Beardsley influence but that influence is certainly present in the stylised faces, the figure details and the rendering of the hair. The Beatles themselves were enthused enough with Aubrey to put his face among the pantheon of “people that we like” on the sleeve of Sgt. Pepper a year later. I’d thought for a while that Voorman might have been inspired by the landmark Beardsley exhibition which ran at the V&A in London from May–September 1966. Some correspondence with Raymond Newman, author of Abracadabra, a book about the album, disabused me of that when Raymond confirmed that Voorman in 1966 had already been a Beardsley fan for a number of years.

As well as being possibly the first Beardsleyesque album cover, I wonder whether this was also the first major album release to drop the name of the artist from the front of the sleeve.

Everyone went psychedelic in 1967, even tough mods like The Who. This Hapshash and the Coloured Coat promo poster for I Can See For Miles (incidentally my favourite Who song) is one of Hapshash’s more overt Beardsley borrowings. The sun (or moon) in the background is a variation on Beardsley’s The Woman in the Moon from Salomé (the face is Oscar Wilde’s) while Pete Townshend’s florid sorcerer’s cloak owes much to Aubrey’s incredible cover design (blocked in gold on the book) for Volpone.

The Woman in the Moon (1893).

Volpone (1897).

From the sublime to the ridiculous. Cathy Berberian was the mezzo-soprano wife of avant garde composer Luciano Berio, with a long career as a singer of serious classical and contemporary classical works. Her rendition of Berio’s Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)–an electroacoustic setting of the “Sirens” prelude from Ulysses–was one of the tracks on the 1967 electroacoustic compilation Electronic Music III discussed here in April. She also had a separate career as an operatic interpreter of pop music and this collection of Beatles songs dates either from 1968 or 69, depending on which source you choose to believe. Whatever the year, the designer pulled off a decent enough copy of the Revolver sleeve. For a taste of the Berberian style, there’s a sample here. And if you’re desperate for the entire album, this page has a copy.

I’m sure this doesn’t exhaust the Beardsley influence in sleeve design, there must be others between 1968 and 2008. Once again, if you know of any further examples, please leave a comment.

Humble Pie by Humble Pie (1970).

Update: Added Humble Pie’s self-titled third album. The illustration this time is Beardsley’s own, The Stomach Dance from Salomé.

Dreams by Gabor Szabo (1968).

Update 2: Therese discovered this great sleeve for an album by the Hungarian jazz guitarist. No credit available for the artist, unfortunately, and this is the largest copy I could find. Not AB but a great drawing nonetheless.

Witchcraft by Witchcraft (2004).

Update 3: Another addition, the debut album from Swedish metal band Witchcraft which uses Beardsley’s Merlin vignette from the Morte D’Arthur. Thanks to Cyphane for the tip.

Molly Moonbeam by Coach Fingers (2007).

Ballade Of Tristram’s Last Harping by The 17th Pygmy (aka 17 Pygmies) (2007).

Update 4: Added a couple of new discoveries. The 17th Pygmy album apparently includes further Beardsley pieces in its booklet while the Coach Fingers single also has a label featuring designs by Beardsley’s contemporary, Sidney Sime.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Look presents Nigel Waymouth
• Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert
• The New Love Poetry
• The Avant Garde Project
• A splendid time is guaranteed for all
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé

“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 to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book.

The corrupting French novel which Lord Henry Wotton gives to Dorian Gray is never named by Oscar Wilde but its identity is no secret. À Rebours (Against Nature) by Joris-Karl Huymans was published in 1884 and Wilde, Whistler and others were immediately impressed by what amounts to a manual for the lifestyle of a Decadent Aesthete. Wilde fell sufficiently under its spell to have Dorian Gray in the later chapters of his own novel indulge his senses much like Huysmans’ protagonist, Des Esseintes; where Des Esseintes grows poisonous blooms and fills his room with exotic perfumes, Dorian Gray luxuriates over a hoard of precious stones.

À Rebours features lengthy descriptions of Symbolist art, with particular attention given to Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon. Yet despite the visual description Arthur Zaidenberg’s illustrations are the only ones I’ve come across to date. The book may be influential but it seems too obscure to have attracted illustrators. Zaidenberg’s drawings from a 1931 edition are executed in a woodcut style not far removed from Frans Masereel’s earlier work in books such as Die Stadt (1925), and as such the style is fashionably spare, not necessarily the right choice for a work concerned with sensory delirium. (This Zaidenberg street scene from 1937 shows a definite Masereel influence.) I’d much rather have seen Harry Clarke illustrate Huysmans. Zaidenberg’s drawings are also curious for their foregrounding of the sexual content which makes me think this edition may have been sold on the basis of a salacious reputation. The scene below, for example, doesn’t occur in the novel but can be implied from the description of Des Esseintes meeting a schoolboy in the Avenue de Latour-Maubourg.

“Never had he experienced a more alluring relationship.”

The complete (?) set of Zaidenberg’s illustrations can be seen here. Pages from a later artists’ manual, Anyone Can Draw, are at VTS.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Osborne’s Dorian Gray
• Because Wilde’s worth it
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Dorian Gray revisited
• Frans Masereel’s city
• The Poet and the Pope
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II

Bijoux modernes (c. 1900) from a series of Art Nouveau designs by Rene Beauclair. As usual the peacock caught my attention on this page. There’s more by Beauclair at the NYPL Digital Gallery

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Elizabetes Iela 10b, Riga
• The Divine Sarah
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard

Aubrey Beardsley photographed by Frederick Evans (1894).

I’ve been going through the Coulthart VHS library recently, transferring to DVD recordings which can’t be purchased or found online. Among these is a drama from the BBC’s Playhouse strand, Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert, broadcast in 1982. This follows the life of artist Aubrey Beardsley from the time of Oscar Wilde’s arrest in April 1895—which event resulted in Beardsley losing his position at The Yellow Book—through the foundation of The Savoy magazine, to his tubercular death in March 1898.

John Dicks as Aubrey.

Playhouse was a BBC 2 equivalent of Play for Today (which usually ran on BBC 1) and Aubrey like many other dramas of the period was shot on video in the studio. This was done for convenience as well as being cheaper than shooting on film, since scenes could be filmed using several cameras simultaneously. The drawback is that the image looks very harsh, and historical works such as this often seem unreal and artificial as a result. That aside, this was an excellent production with some great performances, especially Ronald Lacey as Leonard Smithers and Rula Lenska as Aubrey’s sister, Mabel. The details of Beardsley’s life are very accurate, down to his beloved Mantegna prints on the walls, and many of the scenes are arranged to correspond with his drawings, the production design being largely monochrome.

Rula Lenska and John Dicks.

Despite the limited production, the mise-en-scene presents carefully framed shots like the one above which create Beardsley-like compositions. Geoff Powell was the production designer and Peter Hammond the director. Hammond later directed several of the Sherlock Holmes adaptations for Granada TV. Producer Rosemary Hill had previously produced some of the BBC’s ghost story adaptations which have acquired a cult reputation in recent years.

Rula Lenska is ideal as Mabel Beardsley, John Dicks less so as Aubrey although his aquiline profile certainly matches that of the artist. In many scenes he seems simply too robust and healthy and he’s also conspicuously too old (he was 35 at the time) to be playing a man of 22. Gilbert agrees with a number of Beardsley’s biographers that there was an incestuous component to Aubrey and Mabel’s relationship and this is dramatically demonstrated in a later scene.

One of the many visual quotes. Just before Aubrey arrives at a theatre to see a Wagner performance we see this moment based on Lady Gold’s Escort.

Lady Gold’s Escort from The Yellow Book (1894).

Turned away from the theatre for his perceived association with the now disreputable Wilde, Aubrey goes to visit André Raffalovich and John Gray. Raffalovich and Gray were no friends of Wilde (nor he of they) but the wealthy Raffalovich supported Beardsley through some lean times. Raffalovich is played here by Sandor Elès (left) and when he turns around at the end of the scene he reveals the design of Beardsley’s Peacock Skirt on his dressing gown.

The Mirror of Love (1895).

Beardsley produced a frontispiece, The Mirror of Love, for The Thread and the Path, a collection of Raffalovich’s poems but the drawing was rejected by the publisher for its allegedly “hermaphrodite” figure.

Raffalovich and Gray were a gay couple, of course, and their scene has Simon Shepherd as John Gray doing a great deal of lusciously languid posing on the black sheets.

In a later bedroom scene Beardsley and Leonard Smithers meet for the first time, with the bed modelled on the (imaginary) one seen in Portrait of Himself.

Portrait of Himself from The Yellow Book (1894).

Another quote: Arthur Symons and Beardsley planning The Savoy magazine in France with a trio of waiters borrowed from Garçons de Café.

Garçons de Café from The Yellow Book (1894).

Ronald Lacey again as Smithers, the pornographer publisher about whom Oscar Wilde said:

His face, clean shaven as befits a priest who serves at the altar whose God is Literature, is wasted and pale—not with poetry, but with poets, who, he says, have wrecked his life by insisting on publishing with him. He loves first editions, especially of women: little girls are his passion. He is the most learned erotomaniac in Europe. He is also a delightful companion and a dear fellow…

In this scene we see the publisher and contributors of The Savoy celebrating the appearance of the first number at the New Lyric Club. The magazine ran for eight issues and was banned by WH Smith’s. Part of the reason for the magazine’s failure was that this embargo prevented it being sold at railway station stands owned by Smith’s.

Christopher Strauli as Arthur Symons, The Savoy’s literary editor, and an actor I always associate with Bunny Manders, the role he played in earlier TV adaptations of Raffles.

Mark Tandy as WB Yeats.

Alex Norton (right) as Max Beerbohm, showing Aubrey a caricature he’s just drawn of Yeats. Beerbohm caricatured Beardsley on several occasions, and later satirised the “Yellow Nineties” in his wonderful short story Enoch Soames, so it’s perhaps fitting to end with one of Beerbohm’s drawings.

Aubrey Beardsley by Max Beerbohm (1894).

NB: I’ve no idea where or how you’d be able to see Aubrey for yourself and I certainly won’t be distributing copies so please don’t ask for one. Thanks. Anyone desperate to see it is advised to petition the BBC.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• “The game is afoot!”
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé

Retroactive I (1964).

My youthful enthusiasm for art acquainted me with the name of Robert Rauschenberg (who died two days ago) earlier than most. Surrealism and Pop Art held an appeal that was immediate, if rather superficially appreciated at the time, and it was seeing works from both those movements which were the most memorable aspect of my first visit to the Tate Gallery when I was 13. Later on when I was reading JG Ballard’s stories and essays in back numbers of New Worlds, Rauschenberg was one of a handful of artists who seemed to depict in visual terms what Ballard was describing in words. In this respect Robert Hughes’s discussion of the “landscape of media” (Ballard’s common phrase would be “media landscape”) below is coincidental but significant. Retroactive I was painted a couple of years before Ballard began the stories that would later become The Atrocity Exhibition and it could easily serve as an illustration for that book.

There are and will be plenty of words written elsewhere about Rauschenberg’s work and influence. I’ll note here his inclusion in the list of gay artists at GLBTQ for his creative and personal partnership with another great Pop artist, Jasper Johns.

One of the artists (television) most affected in the Sixties was Rauschenberg. In 1962, he began to apply printed images to canvas with silkscreen—the found image, not the found object, was incorporated into the work. “I was bombarded with TV sets and magazines,” he recalls, “by the refuse, by the excess of the world … I thought that if I could paint or make an honest work, it should incorporate all of these elements, which were and are a reality. Collage is a way of getting an additional piece of information that’s impersonal. I’ve always tried to work impersonally.” With access to anything printed, Rauschenberg could draw on an unlimited bank of images for his new paintings, and he set them together with a casual narrative style. In heightening the documentary flavour of his work, he strove to give canvas the accumulative flicker of a colour TV set. The bawling pressure of images—rocket, eagle, Kennedy, crowd, street sign, dancer, oranges, box, mosquito—creates an inventory of modern life, the lyrical outpourings of a mind jammed to satiation with the rapid, the quotidian, the real. In its peacock-hued, electron-sweetbox tints, this was an art that Marinetti and the Berlin Dadaists would have recognized at once: an agglomeration of memorable signs, capable of facing the breadth of the street. Their subject was glut.

Rauschenberg’s view of this landscape of media was both affectionate and ironic. He liked excavating whole histories within an image—histories of the media themselves. A perfect example is the red patch at the bottom right corner of Retroactive I. It is a silkscreen enlargement of a photo by Gjon Mili, which he found in Life magazine. Mili’s photograph was a carefully set-up parody, with the aid of a stroboscopic flash, of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912. Duchamp’s painting was in turn based on Marey’s photos of a moving body. So the image goes back through seventy years of technological time, through allusion after allusion; and a further irony is that, in its Rauschenbergian form, it ends up looking precisely like the figures of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden in Masaccio’s fresco for the Carmine in Florence. This in turn converts the image of John Kennedy, who was dead by then and rapidly approaching apotheosis as the centre of a mawkish cult, into a sort of vengeful god with a pointing finger, so fulfilling the prophecy Edmond de Goncourt confided to his journal in 1861:

“The day will come when all the modern nations will adore a sort of American god, about whom much will have been written in the popular press; and images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of each individual painter may fancy him, but fixed, once and for all, by photography. On that day civilization will have reached its peak, and there will be steam-propelled gondolas in Venice.”

Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (1980).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Transfer drawings by Robert Rauschenberg
• Jasper Johns
• Michael Petry’s flag
• JG Ballard book covers

Paris and Brussels are well-known centres of Art Nouveau architecture, less well-known but equally valuable is the Latvian capital of Riga whose historic centre is now a World Heritage Site. The highly distinctive building at Elizabetes Iela 10b is one of a number of buildings there designed by Mikhail Eisenstein, father of film director Sergei Eisenstein. The giant decorative heads are quite unique, and I also like the peacock and other mascarons. One can’t help but think that this façade—in a street full of equally detailed façades—would have sustained a lot more attention had it been built in a European capital.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Atelier Elvira
• Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
• The Maison Lavirotte
• The House with Chimaeras

More Art Nouveau and more Paris…. I can’t believe I missed this place when I was in Paris for a week, staying just a few streets away. The building is at 29 Avenue Rapp in the 7th arrondissement and I crossed that street several times when walking to the Champs de Mars and the Eiffel Tower.

The architect was Jules Lavirotte (1864–1929) and the building was named after him following its construction in 1901. His other works aren’t as excessively florid as this, nor do they display the Nouveau elegance of contemporaries such as Hector Guimard, so this façade may owe more to the capitulations of fashion than innate style. The attractively unclad figures on the pediment cock their hips at passers-by in a provocative manner that would never be allowed in British architecture of the period, and the door has some great details with stylised peacocks between the windows and a huge brass lizard for the handle.

• More Parisian doorways
• Jules Lavirotte at Structurae

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Palais du Trocadéro
• The House with Chimaeras
• Paris V: Details

Sarah Bernhardt by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1895).

You can’t be a fin de siècle fetishist and not develop a fascination with actress Sarah Bernhardt, a woman who was muse to many of the era’s finest artists, most notably Alphonse Mucha, who she employed as her official designer. Mucha’s marvellous posters are endlessly popular, of course; less well-known is the sculpture by academic painter and Orientalist Jean-Léon Gérôme, a rare three-dimensional work inspired by the actress.

Inkwell by Sarah Bernhardt (1880).

Even less well-known is Ms Bernhardt’s own design for a curious bat-winged inkwell. I’ve read of her having created other sculptural works but so far this is the only one I’ve seen a picture of. With something as decadent as this you’d really have to use peacock quills for pens, wouldn’t you?

Bracelet by Alphonse Mucha & Georges Fouquet (1899).

And in a similar sinister vein to the inkwell there’s this serpentine bracelet and ring, a superb one-off, designed by Mucha and crafted by the jeweller Fouquet. After seeing works such as this and the Lalique dragonfly (which Ms Bernhardt once wore), most other jewellery seems timid and unadventurous in comparison.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Philippe Wolfers, 1858–1929
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard
• Smoke
• The Masks of Medusa

Random browsing this week turned up some nice high-res photos of Harmony in Blue and Gold, as James Abbott McNeill Whistler named the room he decorated for Frederick R. Leyland in 1878. Leyland had bought one of Whistler’s paintings, La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1864), and architect Thomas Jeckyll was concerned that the painting and furnishings would clash, hence the invitation for Whistler to help with the colour scheme.

I’ve always preferred this luscious, gold-leafed design to the worthy medievalism of contemporary William Morris. Even though Whistler completed the work prior to the 1890s, the combination of Orientalism and peacocks (the signature bird of the Decadence) seems very much tied to the fin de siècle not least because of Aubrey and Mabel Beardsley’s visit to the room in 1891. Beardsley was very impressed with the painting and with the golden birds, the style of which later formed the inspiration for his famous Peacock Skirt illustration in Salomé (1894).

There’s a good overview here of the history of the room, including details of the falling out between the combative artist and his client, and the story of the room’s removal to America and subsequent restoration.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé

So the first book purchase of the year turns out to be the original Dover edition of Beardsley and Wilde’s Salomé. This appeared in 1967, a year after the major V&A exhibition which introduced Beardsley’s work to a new generation and commenced the Beardsley craze that lasted into the Seventies. Not that I’m in desperate need of these drawings, having most of them several times already in different Beardsley books, but this volume is worth having since the reproductions are large size, very sharp and they took enough care to ensure that the uncensored versions of the drawings were used. The book also includes the complete text of Wilde’s play and Robert Ross’s Note on Salomé from 1930 which I don’t have elsewhere.

Beardsley’s work was subject to many censorship actions during his career but the Salomé book caused the most trouble (his later erotic works were private editions so don’t really count). The original title page shown here had the semi-erect penis of the winged boy and the pendulous genitals of the herma removed while one drawing, The Toilette of Salomé, was deemed too much and had to be redrawn entirely. That picture did contain a masturbating page boy so it’s perhaps not so surprising. There was such a lot to offend Victorian sensibilities in Beardsley’s work at this time, whether overt or surreptitious, that it’s remarkable the book was printed at all. His art was so radically different from anything else being done in 1894 that many people had difficulty accepting these pictures as illustrations at all, regardless of the content. As a result they missed salacious details that would have finished the career of a lesser artist. Wilde’s play was equally scandalous and could only be performed in France, having been banished from the London stage. As Robert Ross says in his Note:

Wilde used to say that Salomé was a mirror in which everyone could see himself. The artist, art; the dull, dullness; the vulgar, vulgarity.

The sense of shock extended back to Beardley’s original Salomé drawing (also included in the Dover volume) which appeared in the first number of The Studio in 1893, some of the readers of that magazine finding the detail of the spilled blood nourishing a phallic lily a grotesque detail too far. The Studio drawing was reworked and simplified as The Climax for Salomé. You can see the complete set of illustrations here. Neither that collection nor the Dover book include a picture of the original cover, however, whose splendid gold-on-green peacock feathers look a lot more impressive than Beardley’s rough design. So here it is.

• Download the 1906 US edition of Salomé free at Archive.org

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peter Reed and Salomé After Dark
• “Weirdsley Daubery”: Beardsley and Punch
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• The Poet and the Pope

Previous posts about illustrators.

• Dalí in Wonderland

• The Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest

• Der Orchideengarten illustrated

• Equus and the Executionist

• Mervyn Peake at Maison d’Ailleurs

• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

• The art of Raphaël Freida

• The art of Bertha Lum, 1869–1954

• The art of George Barbier, 1882–1932

• The art of Warwick Goble, 1862–1943

• Steinlen’s cats

• Science fiction and fantasy covers

• Willy Pogàny’s Lohengrin

• Charles Ricketts’ Hero and Leander

• The art of Pamela Colman Smith, 1878–1951

• Der Orchideengarten

• The art of Ed Emshwiller, 1925–1990

• Harry Clarke’s stained glass

• Henry Keen’s Dorian Gray

• Peake’s Pan

• Pite’s West End folly

• Gandharva by Beaver & Krause

• The White Peacock

• Einar Nerman

• More Arabian Nights

• Edward William Lane’s Arabian Nights Entertainments

• John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems

• Butterfly women

• Jugend Magazine

• The art of Maxwell Armfield, 1881–1972

• Buccaneers #1

• The art of Claude Fayette Bragdon, 1866–1946

• The art of Dugald Stewart Walker, 1883–1937

• Jim Cawthorn, 1929–2008

• December and Vernon Hill

• Guy Peellaert, 1934–2008

• Last in Line by Light Syndicate

• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

• Peacocks

• The art of John Hurford

• La belle sans nom

• Alan Aldridge: The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes

• The art of Pierre Clayette, 1930–2005

• Ronald Searle book covers

• Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein

• Aubrey Beardsley’s musical afterlife

• The faces of Parsifal

• Willy Pogàny’s Parsifal

• The art of Mahlon Blaine, 1894–1969

• Pauline Baynes, 1922–2008

• Arthur Zaidenberg’s À Rebours

• San Francisco angels

• Maldoror illustrated

• The monstrous tome

• Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert

• The art of Virginia Frances Sterrett, 1900–1933

• The art of Ian Miller

• Dorothy Lathrop’s Three Mulla-mulgars

• Franklin Booth’s Flying Islands

• The art of Boris Artzybasheff, 1899–1965

• Meggendorfer’s Blatter

• Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal

• Sidney Sime and Lord Dunsany

• Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers

• The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937

• William Heath Robinson’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

• Austin Spare’s Behind the Veil

• Jessie M King’s Grey City of the North

• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring

• The art of Sascha Schneider, 1870–1927

• Dorian Gray revisited

• William Blake in Manchester

• Mervyn Peake in Lilliput

• Beardsley’s Salomé

• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

• Hugh Ferriss and The Metropolis of Tomorrow

• Petrucelli’s Christmas

• The art of Stella Langdale, 1880–1976

• The Age of Enchantment: Beardsley, Dulac and their Contemporaries

• The poster art of Richard Amsel

• Family Dog postcards

• Cain’s son: the incarnations of Grendel

• “Weirdsley Daubery”: Beardsley and Punch

• Winsor McCay’s Hippodrome souvenirs

• The art of Jessie M King, 1875–1949

• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia

• The art of George Sheringham, 1884–1937

• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem

• The art of John Bauer, 1882–1918

• Gods’ Man by Lynd Ward

• The art of Bob Pepper

• Architectural renderings by HW Brewer

• The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949

• Howard Pyle’s pirates

• Rex Whistler revisited

• The art of John Austen, 1886–1948

• The art of Patten Wilson, 1868–1928

• Fantastic art from Pan Books

• The poster art of Bob Peak

• The Illustrators of Alice

• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

• Fantazius Mallare and the Kingdom of Evil

• HP Lovecraft’s favourite artists

• The Decorative Age

• The art of Erik Desmazières

• Images of Nijinsky

• The World in 2030

• Wladyslaw Benda

• The art of Virgil Finlay, 1914–1971

• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

• The art of Rex Whistler, 1905–1944

More archive pages:
• The archive page archive

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 the art books that Pan/Ballantine published in the UK throughout the 1970s. These were published simultaneously by Ballantine/Peacock Press in the US and nearly all were edited by David Larkin, with Betty Ballantine overseeing the American editions. Two of the series, the Dalí and Magritte, were among the first art books I owned. Over the years I’ve gradually accumulated almost the full set and I always look for their distinctive white spines in secondhand shops.

The Pan books were a uniform size, approximately A4 (297 x 210 mm), with a single picture on each recto page and generous margins. The reproductions were excellent, printed on quality paper, and all featured specially-commissioned introductions (Ballard for the Dali book) with those pages printed on textured sheets. Each book was beautifully designed, with the opening pages and introductions often featuring black and white vignettes if the artists in question produced line drawings. Editor Larkin’s focus was on art that tended to the fantastic, visionary or imaginative, something that was in vogue throughout the Seventies after psychedelic art had ransacked the Victorian and Edwardian eras for inspiration a few years earlier. Aubrey Beardsley had been rediscovered in the mid-Sixties (ending up on the cover of Sgt. Pepper) and underground magazines such as Oz and IT helped create a renewed interest in art that would look good when you were stoned or tripping. The Pan books weren’t “head books” as such but its probably fair to say that the series was supported and made possible by that spirit.

Magritte (1972).
Cover: The Son of Man.

As the series developed, the format evolved away from fine art towards contemporary fantasy art, and as a result became less interesting for me, although the success of the Frazetta books undoubtedly meant that this was the way the sales were going. The demand for the Ernst and Rousseau titles can be gauged by the remainder cut-outs on their covers. The final volumes (which I’ve never bought) featured artists such as Brian Froud (The Dark Crystal), Alan Lee (The Lord of the Rings) and others, with their Faeries, Giants, Castles and Gnomes books. I’m still missing a couple of the earlier numbers which I could now order online but that would spoil the game of letting chance deliver the goods, wouldn’t it?

Fantastic Art is easily my favourite, a great collection of visionary work through the ages beginning with Bosch and proceeding through Goya, John Martin, Richard Dadd, the Symbolists and the Surrealists to what was then contemporary work by artists such as Hundertwasser. This was one of the first of the series and seems to be the key volume in the way it provides an overview of the art that would follow.

Dali (1974).
Cover: Raphaelesque Head Exploding.

A great introduction by JG Ballard in this one, replete with the usual phrases about “the dark causeways of our spinal columns”.

Innocent Art (1974).
Cover: Cat by André Duranton.

A collection of what used to be called naive painting, ie: work by unschooled “Sunday painters” such as Rousseau. Outsider art is the preferred term these days even though the work itself hasn’t always changed.

Max Ernst (1975).
Cover: Euclid.

Ernst’s later work in this book was the most abstract and experimental of the series. Europe After the Rain was printed across a fold-out sheet so that its full width could be displayed.

Rousseau (1975).
Cover: The Merry Jesters.

The English Dreamers (1975).
Cover: The Bridesmaid by John Everett Millais.

Arthur Rackham (1975).
Cover: Clerk Colville (from Some British Ballads).

Temptation (1975).
Cover: Ferdinand Lured by Ariel by John Everett Millais.

An unusual collection with a wide range of pictures (Bosch, Alma-Tadema, Balthus). Mainly concerns sexual temptation for female bodies but also includes Biblical and other temptations.

The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta (1975).
Cover: Egyptian Queen.

The book that launched a thousand metal albums. Volume One here was the first attempt to collect Frazetta’s work and was easily the most popular title of the series, going through many reprintings and inspiring three more volumes to follow. Many of the reproductions are superior to their equivalents in the later Icon retrospective collection. This was the first one I bought after the Surrealist books and, while I’ve never been a muscle fan, I couldn’t help but notice all the male flesh on display.

The Fantastic Creatures of Edward Julius Detmold (1976).
Cover: Shere Khan in the jungle (from The Jungle Book).

Charles and William Heath Robinson (1976).
Cover: Elfin Mount (from Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales).

A collection of the Robinsons’ fairy tale paintings. A break from the format with a blue cover.

The Paintings of Carl Larsson (1976).
Cover: The Kitchen.

Another break with the format as the book is printed landscape to suit Larsson’s drawings and paintings. As with the Ernst book, a fold-out page was a special feature.

The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen (1977).
Cover: The Tale of the Third Dervish.

A collection of Nielsen’s work modelled after Turkish and Persian miniatures.

Frank Frazetta, Book Two (1977).
Cover: Dark Kingdom.

Frank Frazetta, Book Three (1978).
Cover painting: Nightwinds.

The Fantastic Art of Sulamith Wülfing (1978).
Cover: The Big Dragon.

Part of the series but published by Fontana/Collins, not Pan.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Alla Nazimova was another of these exotic creatures, and rather more exotic than most since she was at least a genuine Russian, even if she also had to amend her given name (Mariam Edez Adelaida Leventon) to exaggerate the effect. Like an opera diva or a great ballerina she dropped her forename as her career progressed, and is billed as Nazimova only in her 1923 screen adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play, Salomé. Nazimova inaugurated the project, produced it and even part-financed it since the studios, increasingly worried by pressure from moral campaigners, regarded it as a dangerously decadent work. Nazimova had a rather colourful off-screen life and the stories of orgiastic revels at her mansion, the Garden of Allah, probably didn’t help matters.

Salomé lobby card (1923).

Salomé: The Peacock Skirt by Aubrey Beardsley (1893).

It may seem bizarre to make a silent film of a stage play but silent adaptations of Shakespeare had been around since film’s earliest days. The task of adapting Wilde was given to Natacha Rambova, wife of Rudolph Valentino. If you’re going to cut down the available dialogue, however, it helps if the audience is familiar with the story. Nazimova’s audience in 1923 would have known of Salomé from their Bibles but Wilde’s play has rarely been considered a stage masterwork and remains largely unknown even today. The film’s intertitles were deemed too wordy and the production flopped as a result. This is a shame since the film is a curiosity, not least for the decision to base the production design on the Aubrey Beardsley illustrations that have accompanied (overshadowed, even) the printed edition of the play since its first publication.

Salomé: The Climax by Aubrey Beardsley (1893).

The film remains intriguing also for its distinctly gay aura. Nazimova was a lesbian and, in one of those rumours that persists around certain productions, was said to have demanded that most, if not all, the cast be gay or bisexual. The director certainly was. Charles Bryant (also an actor) lived with Nazimova in what was known at the time as a “lavender marriage”, a partnership between a gay man and a lesbian that enabled both to masquerade in a manner acceptable to contemporary mores. I haven’t read Gavin Lambert’s biography of Nazimova so details about the rest of the cast are sketchy but we know there was at least one other gay actor involved. Arthur Jasmine who played the page of Herodias was known in later life as Sampson (also Samson) de Brier and his house and person feature prominently in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954).

Nazimova and Arthur Jasmine in a shot modelled on Beardsley’s Peacock Skirt.

Salomé is available in the US on DVD accompanied by another curious Biblical work with prurient interest, Lot in Sodom (1933).

On a final note, the associations between Salomé and silent cinema carry over to my own Salomé picture from 2002. This was a Photoshop collage which began life as a rather chaste still of silent star Norma Talmadge. I gave Norma a pair of bare breasts, a beaded necklace, bangles and a severed head to hold. I hope she forgives me.

Salomé by Coulthart (2002).

• Salomé movie photo gallery
• A review from Motion Picture magazine, October 1922
• The complete text of Wilde’s play in French (as originally written) and English
• A complete set of Beardsley’s Salomé illustrations

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fantazius Mallare and the Kingdom of Evil
• The Decorative Age
• Images of Nijinsky
• Metropolis posters
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931