Mighty Baby (1969). Illustration by Martin Sharp.

Yet another album cover prompts this post, part of an occasional series. Mighty Baby were a British rock band who formed out of psychedelic group The Action in the late Sixties, and their music is fairly typical of the period, being “heavy” without any of the psych trappings which—for me—often make everything from that time a lot more interesting. This was a journey undertaken by many groups at the end of that lurid decade, a junking of the playful and evocative side of what was now called rock music in favour of a denim-clad earnestness. This album isn’t one I like very much—I’d rather listen to their earlier incarnation—but the cover painting by psych artist Martin Sharp is certainly a startling piece, being a violent mutation of one of the most famous Tarzan drawings by comic artist Burne Hogarth.

Tarzan by Burne Hogarth (194?).

Hogarth was drawing Tarzan for much of the 1940s and this particular panel showing the Ape-Man attacking Numa the lion dates from the latter part of his run on the series. I wish I could pin this to an actual year but I don’t have a complete set of the comics and that detail eluded me. If anyone knows the date, please leave a comment.

Reverbstorm 7 (2000).

Readers of the Savoy comics series, Reverbstorm, which David Britton and I created in the 1990s, will be familiar with its many references to Hogarth and other artists (some of which were catalogued here). The image of Tarzan and Numa was reworked on three separate occasions. The first was a double-page piece in a long run of pages which are the most excessive and outrageous things I’ve drawn to date. Burne Hogarth saw some of this work, including this spread, and while he wasn’t impressed at all by the violence he had the good grace to say some very flattering things about my drawing.

That image of Lord Horror on the solar-phallic lion was reworked for the cover painting in a style intended to resemble the work of Frank Frazetta. This version also tries to match Hogarth’s original more closely.

Near the end of Reverbstorm #7 one finds this panel showing Jessie Matthews astride Picasso’s bull from Guernica (1937) in the midst of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884). How the story gets to a point of such intertextual confusion would involve far too much explanation; the curious will just have to buy the comics, or wait for the definitive book edition to appear.

I’m fairly sure I’ve seen other reworkings of Hogarth’s drawing aside from the Sharp version. If anyone knows of others, please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #10: Victor Moscoso
• Design as virus #9: Mondrian fashions
• Max (The Birdman) Ernst
• Design as virus #8: Keep Calm and Carry On
• Design as virus #7: eyes and triangles
• Design as virus #6: Cassandre
• Design as virus #5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus #4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders
• My pastiches
• A premonition of Premonition

Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez.

The sight of one of Picasso’s many versions of Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) by Velázquez earlier this week prompts this post. An endlessly fascinating painting whose influence runs through three hundred years of art history. That influence isn’t so surprising if you consider this as a painter’s painting; it certainly never seems to figure in the canon of favourite works among the wider public. But artists are beguiled by the games it plays with our ways of seeing: a self-portrait of the artist painting a subject (the royal couple) standing where the viewer would be, with the couple seen in reflection in the mirror on the back wall. We are the watchers and the watched. Wikimedia Commons has a decently large copy of the painting.

I’ve long been fascinated by the detail of the queen’s chamberlain, Don José Nieto Velázquez, standing on the steps at the back of the picture. Lines of perspective draw our attention to his figure, not only the perspective of the room but also the line which can be drawn across the heads of the three figures in the foreground right. I always look to see how Don José is treated in subsequent variations, some of which appear below.

Las Meninas, after Velázquez (c. 1778) by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes.

One of the commonplaces of contemporary art is artworks about other artworks. Goya’s etching shows that this idea is by no means a new one. Goya was apparently dissatisfied with his attempt, and its main interest is the degree to which he distorts various parts of the picture.

The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar (1919) by Harry Clarke.

Harry Clarke scholar Nicola Gordon Bowe proposed in The Life and Work of Harry Clarke (1989) that the figure in the background of this Poe illustration was a version of Don José. Clarke’s picture also has a similar grouping of foreground figures which adds to the speculation. The division of space in the Velázquez painting would have held considerable appeal for an artist used to dealing with similar divisions in his stained glass window designs. Will at A Journey Round My Skull recently uploaded a set of high-resolution scans of Clarke’s Poe drawings and paintings.

Las Meninas (after Velazquez) (1957) by Pablo Picasso.

In the 1950s Picasso took to producing a series of variations on favourite paintings. There are 44 versions of Las Meninas, some more abstract than others. This one reminds me of Guernica and I like the humour of presenting Velázquez’s dog—one of the great dogs of art history—as though it’s been drawn by Nicolas Pertusato, the child who attempts to rouse the animal with his foot. Velázquez here has a head surmounting a spindly body comprised of the Order of Santiago cross.

Las Meninas (1960) by Salvador Dalí.

Salvador Dalí venerated Velázquez and he happily quoted other artists throughout his career so it’s no surprise to find variations of Las Meninas. This wins the award for the most eccentric, with the figures reduced to numerals. Closer examination shows it to be quite clever the way each number corresponds to a different figure. The use of the number 7 for the artist and for Don José makes sense when you consider that they share the same surname. Don José turns up alone is another painting the same year, a work entitled Maelstrom: Portrait of Juan de Pareja fixing a string of his mandolin.

Picasso’s Meninas (1973) by Richard Hamilton.

Richard Hamilton’s aquatint is equally playful, substituting Velázquez with Picasso and his works.

The Haunter of the Dark (1986).

I seem to have referred to my own work quite a lot recently, and here’s some more of it. The panel on the right quotes from Harry Clarke’s Poe illustration and so can be considered as continuing a trace element of the shadowy Don.

Las Meninas (Self Portrait) (1987) by Joel-Peter Witkin.

Joel-Peter Witkin has quoted Picasso’s works frequently in his photo-tableaux so the Picasso-esque figure on the right is perhaps inevitable. Witkin also has a considerable fondness for dead things so it’s quite likely that the dog in this photograph isn’t sleeping.

I’ll be surprised if there haven’t been a lot more variations during the past twenty years. If anyone knows of any which are better than this item by Antonio Guijarro Morales, please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Picasso-esque
• Reflections of Narcissus
• My pastiches
• Guernica, seventy years on
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

A juxtaposition of old and new theatre posters in the New York Times caught my eye this week, part of a feature about the current Broadway run of Peter Shaffer’s play. The news there, of course, has been Daniel Radcliffe’s on-stage nudity; understandable, perhaps, but celebrity trivia has overshadowed appraisal of Shaffer’s work as a piece of art.

What struck me seeing these was the two very different approaches to the same design problem. Given the subject matter, using an image of a horse is somewhat unavoidable as well as being immediately attractive since horses nearly always look good. The freight of historical and cultural association they carry is also one of the themes of the play. I really like the spare treatment of Gilbert Lesser’s 1976 poster for the National Theatre (left) and much prefer it to the new version used for the London and New York shows. The Lesser poster has the quality of a puzzle, matching the psychological piecing together of the story and Alan Strang’s accusation that Dysart the psychiatrist is always “playing games”. It also has a sinister quality lacking in the contemporary version; Shaffer’s Equus is an unforgiving god and the black eyes could refer to the blinded horses. The Photoshop horse looks altogether too mundane and is it my imagination or is the horse head misshapen slightly in order to fit the torso?

The poster for Sidney Lumet’s 1977 film version was the work of Bob Peak and his horse is a suitably ferocious presence. His rendering of the figures as primitive shapes swimming in shadow is the kind of thing no Hollywood studio would allow today. The Bob Peak site has several intriguing variations on this design which show how the poster might otherwise have appeared. Peak was particularly good with horses, as his brilliant designs for The Black Stallion show. And Carroll Ballard’s film might be seen as the flip-side of Equus with its tag-line “A boy. A myth. A god.” Or maybe it’s the pre-adolescent version, before the boy’s passion for horses becomes intensified by sex.

The sinister shadow behind all these images is the skull of the horse which the National Theatre poster hints at and whose presence is explicitly evoked in the opening shot of Lumet’s film where we see a knife with a carved handle (above). The ancient icon of a horse skull is the principal element of the Welsh folk figure of the Mari Lwyd, described thus:

The Mari Lwyd consists of a mare’s skull fixed to the end of a wooden pole; white sheets are fastened to the base of the skull, concealing the pole and the person carrying the Mari. The eye sockets are often filled with green bottle-ends, or other coloured material. The lower jaw is sometimes spring-loaded, so that the Mari’s ‘operator’ can snap it at passers-by. Coloured ribbons are usually fixed to the skull and to the reins (if any).

Red Halter by Clive Hicks-Jenkins (2001).

These various themes—horses, their skulls, sexuality, death—find potent expression in the Mari Lwyd series of paintings and drawings by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, a succession of stylised, Picasso-esque figures and the horses they encounter. As in Equus, the horse in Hicks-Jenkins’ work—whether alive or dead—is the connecting bond between the present and an ancient, primal past:

The sexy muscled young man, emerging more and more from the sheet as the series goes on, could be one of the dancers Clive directed. But the menacing horse’s death-head he carries is a powerful metaphor for AIDS. He seems to be offering and taking away at the same time, an alluring invitation and a deadly threat. There is ancient as well as contemporary menace here, too – the severed horse’s head as a sacrificial object from the iron age. The head is also a memento mori.

All of which has served to remind me of a painting of my own which I produced just over ten years ago and which receives its first public showing here.

This was little more than a sketch in acrylics based on the horse in Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare. It too owes a debt to Picasso and there’s something of the Mari Lwyd about it, especially the teeth. I’ve no idea now why I painted this but then art doesn’t always justify its existence with a reason. I never gave this a title at the time. Perhaps Equus would be fitting?

Update: Daniel is very taken with the actor who plays one of the horses.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• Perfume: the art of scent

Pages from Der Amethyst (1906).

Okay, don’t get too excited, I simply wanted to make a couple of points of order while this story is still causing a stir. I noted earlier the recent (London) Times piece about James Hawes’ new book, Excavating Kafka, described as a work which:

seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a “quasi-saintly” image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals.

Hawes claims to have been surprised, if not shocked, by the discovery—new to him but not to Kafka scholars, it seems—of Kafka’s collection of Franz Blei publications, The Amethyst and Opals. Blei published Kafka’s short stories as well as other literary works and fits the mould of many small publishers (Leonard Smithers and Maurice Girodias come to mind) who financed poorly-selling literature with erotic titles. Kafka may well have been “paid” for his writing with these books. However:

Even today, the pornography would be “on the top shelf”, Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. “These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action… It’s quite unpleasant.”

Read the rest of the breathless saga here. The Times doesn’t show any of the pictures in that piece but the paper edition showed a drawing which looked like the usual erotica of the period, a slightly cruder version of the kind of thing done so well by artists like Franz von Bayros. So not photographs, then, but drawings. Sure enough, descriptions of Blei’s books list well-known names such as Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Kubin, Thomas Theodore Heine, Karl Hofer, Félicien Rops, and von Bayros. Yesterday’s Guardian examined some of the reaction to Hawes’ assertions from other Kafka scholars which is generally hostile, their counter-assertion being that he’s making a mountain out of a molehill. That piece includes another description of the depraved contents:

They include images of a hedgehog-style creature performing fellatio, golem-like male creatures grasping women’s breasts with their claw-like hands and a picture of a baby emerging from a sliced-open leg.

Hmm…Beardsley, sliced-open leg? That could only be Aubrey’s illustration for Lucian’s True History. Sensitive readers may wish to avert their gaze.

Birth from the Calf of the Leg. Illustration intended for Lucian’s True History (1894). Not used, but published in An Issue of Five Drawings Illustrative of Juvenal and Lucian by Leonard Smithers, London (1906).

Shocking stuff. Allow me to veer from the point for a moment with Beardsley scholar Brian Reade’s explanation of that drawing:

This illustration (was) rejected from the 1894 and 1902 editions of Lucian’s True History. At the time when it was drawn the artist was obsessed by foetuses and irregular births; creatures derived from the foetus form occur in the Bon-Mots series, in The Kiss of Judas, in Salome and elsewhere. That he chose to illustrate this subject suggests that there may have been a latent strain of homosexuality in Beardsley. Lucian describes in his True History the way in which children are born in the kingdom of Endymion on the Moon. “They are not begotten of women, but of mankind: for they have no other marriage but of males: the name of woman is wholly unknown among them: until they accomplish the age of five and twenty years, they are given in marriage to others: from that time forwards they take others in marriage to themselves: for as soon as the infant is conceived the leg begins to swell, and afterwards when the time of birth is come, they give it a lance and take it out dead: then they lay it abroad with open mouth towards the wind, and so it takes life: and I think thereof the Grecians call it the belly of the leg, because therein they bear their children instead of a belly”. Lucian also explains that “their boys admit copulation, not like unto ours, but in their hams, a little above the calf of the leg for there they are open”.

The other drawings mentioned by the Guardian don’t sound familiar but may well be by Alfred Kubin who produced a number of curious erotic pieces, one of which is in my Art of Ejaculation post. Meanwhile Die Welt Online reproduces some of the Félicien Rops pictures in a small gallery, all of which are rather innocuous depictions of prostitutes.

Rops could be a lot weirder and wilder than this. (See his Octopus drawing of 1900.) I haven’t seen Hawes’ book yet, but going on this evidence it seems the Kafka scholars may have a point about his inflated claims. Much of this work was shocking at the time, of course, and open publication of some of it would have been an invitation to an obscenity prosecution. But I’ll let the Kafka scholars haggle over Franz’s reputation, quasi-saintly or not; the main point for me was that the works in question are very familiar to anyone who knows the art of the period. So in place of rancour, here’s a nice homoerotic painting by another of the artists published by Blei, Karl Hofer, in style and colour reminiscent of Picasso’s Rose Period pictures.

Drei Badende Jünglinge by Karl Hofer (1907).

Update: this volume finally turned up in the Savoy Books office so I was able to look through it. The Beardsley picture above is indeed among the very few examples of “Kafka’s porn”, used without any credit and Beardsley receives no mention in the index. There’s also a Félicien Rops drawing with a caption which says it “may be Victorian”, along with a couple of other pieces, all equally uncredited. Yes, that’s the level of the scholarship at work here; the author couldn’t even be bothered to research the art in question. Summary: worthless.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A postcard from Doctor Kafka
• Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka
• Kafka and Kupka
• The art of ejaculation
• The art of Félicien Rops, 1833–1898

Ubuweb continues to come up with the very obscure goods. Mary Ellen Bute’s Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is the kind of thing you would have been lucky to see on television even in the days when non-Hollywood fare was screened regularly. Joyce is almost the definitive example of the unfilmable author although that didn’t prevent Joseph Strick from having a go at Ulysses in 1967 and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ten years later. Ulysses if it was filmed at all should probably be done as eighteen hour-long films rather than Strick’s truncated skate through the novel. Some passages work better than others but I’ve never been able to accept Milo O’Shea as Leopold Bloom. Bosco Hogan on the other hand is permanently fixed in my head as Stephen Dedalus having seen Portrait before reading the book.

As to the success of Mary Ellen Bute’s opus, I still haven’t watched it properly so you’ll have to go and look for yourself. It’s little more than an illustrated reading but that’s not necessarily as misguided as it seems. Finnegans Wake for many people is one of English literature’s impregnable fortresses; anything that helps break down the doors is surely worthwhile.

Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
Directed by Mary Ellen Bute
Screenplay by Mary Manning
Cinematography by Ted Nemeth
Music by Elliot Kaplan

Cast (in alphabetical order)
Ray Flanagan . . .Young Shem
Peter Haskell . . . Shem
Page Johnson . . . Shaun
Martin J. Kelley . . . Finnegan
Jane Reilly . . . Anna Livia

There are currently no copies of this film availabe on VHS or DVD; but a 16 mm print is available for museums, universities, and Joycean institutions. Contact Mrs. Cecile Starr at (802) 863-6904; rental is $180.

A half-forgotten, half-legendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce’s polyglot prose to the necessarily concrete imagery of actors and sets, Passages discovers a truly oneiric film style, a weirdly post-New Wave rediscovery of Surrealism, and in her panoply of allusion – 1950s dance crazes, atomic weaponry, ICBMs, and television all make appearances – she finds a cinematic approximation of the novel’s nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure.

With Passages from Finnegans Wake Bute was the first to adapt a work of James Joyce to film and was honored for this project at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 as best debut.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Wyndham Lewis: Portraits
• Picasso-esque
• Books for Bloomsday
• Finnegan begin again

James Joyce by Wyndham Lewis (1921).

Wyndham Lewis: Portraits is an exhibition running at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until October 19, 2008. I’m still slowly reading my way through Ulysses so here’s Lewis’s sketch of Joyce, a drawing I’ve always liked for its curving lines. The exhibition notes mention Joyce as one of the subjects on display so visitors may be able to see the original there.

• Library of the lost | Iain Sinclair on Lewis’s portraiture.
• Banned TS Eliot portrait goes on show

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Picasso-esque
• Books for Bloomsday
• Finnegan begin again

This idling reminded me that I’ve yet to finish reworking the Lord Horror series Reverbstorm which I’ve been engaged with on and off for the past year. The handful of people actually waiting for this magnum opus should know that other work and new Savoy projects keep intervening at the moment. Anyone who saw the original comics will be aware that pastiching Picasso was a consistent theme from issue five onwards. For those who haven’t seen the comics (and few people have…) I’ve posted a couple of the original Picasso-esque Horrors below, beginning with a more representational view of his Lordship for those unfamiliar with the appearance of the man.

A 1997 portrait which owes much to the style of Burne Hogarth’s later Tarzan illustrations.

Reverbstorm 5

Many of the Horror portraits in Reverbstorm were less Picasso-esque than Expressionist or Vorticist. The latter style was very apt for a fascist character like Lord Horror since the Vorticists included among their number fascist apologist Ezra Pound, who gave the group their name, and Wyndham Lewis, who later recanted an early sympathy for Hitler. The figures in the background of this panel and the one below are from Picasso’s Guernica, a persistent reference in the series as a whole.

Reverbstorm 5

Reverbstorm 6

The face on the left above was probably the most Picasso-esque of the Horror faces. I think I applied more of a consistent Picasso style throughout the series to the characters of James Joyce and Jessie Matthews.

This is a vector rendering based on a small notebook sketch done after I’d finished most of the work on Reverbstorm. I’m not sure what style you’d class it as; it comes out of the Picasso extrapolations but what began as a process of copying with many of these drawings soon evolved into a style of its own. This piece and the big portrait above are available as designs on a range CafePress products.

As I’ve said before, any further news about the development of the book edition of Reverbstorm will be posted here. Reverbstorm is some 270 pages of my best artwork so I’m naturally keen to see it published in what will be a definitive edition.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Finnegan begin again
• My pastiches
• Guernica, seventy years on
• Cubist Cthulhu

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 noted in the case of the polymathic Tom Phillips, the pressure is there to establish yourself as a person who does one thing only, to turn yourself into a brand.

American artist Mark Beard isn’t happy with that situation. In order to satisfy a desire to create in whatever styles he chooses, he’s developed a number of distinct artist personalities, each with their own detailed biographies and even photographs (below). This isn’t entirely unprecedented, Marcel Duchamp famously had a female alter-ego named Rrose Sélavy, and was photographed by Man Ray in feminine attire, but offhand I can’t think of another artist going as far as creating six distinct personas. The painting above is one of a homoerotic sports-themed series by artist Bruce Sargeant who died, we’re told, in 1938 as a result of a wrestling accident. Examples of Beard’s other influences follow. For the complete artist biographies, see the Mark Beard pages at the John Stevenson gallery.

The artists

top left: Mark Beard (b. 1956); right: Bruce Sargeant and model (1898-1938)
middle left: Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon (1849-1930); right: Brechtolt Steeruwitz (1890-1973)
bottom left: Edith Thayer Cromwell (1993-1962); right: Peter Coulter (b. 1948)

Their works

Ideology: The Politically Correct Disdain the Frivolous by Mark Beard (1989).

Avant la Fuite by Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon (1894).

Swimmer Drying Himself, Berlin Olympics (1936), Young Athlete by Bruce Sargeant.

On the Strand by Edith Thayer Cromwell.

Das Krakenhaus by Brechtolt Steeruwitz (At the Hospital) (1923).

Cabinet by Peter Coulter.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

A Pictorial Sequence by RH Ives Gammell Based on
The Hound of Heaven (1956):
left: Panel II—I Fled Him, Down The Nights and Down The Days.
right: Panel XI—Would Clash It To.

I mentioned Francis Thompson’s poem The Hound of Heaven in the Stella Langdale post a couple of days ago. There don’t appear to be any examples of those pictures online but there are a few samples of RH Ives Gammell’s remarkable paintings based on the same work which Claire alerted me to last month. Gammell (1893–1981) was an American realist with a forthright attitude that set him against Modernist and later art trends yet he was still able to incorporate a more contemporary approach to composition in these unique works. Too often pitching yourself against the present results in the kind of reactionary posturing one sees at the Art Renewal Center where they wish they could turn the clock back to a time before Picasso. Gammell was smarter than that and his Thompson paintings are a striking series of Tarot-like depictions of Christian mysticism.

Once again I have to make the complaint that there aren’t many good reproductions of these works online at the moment; a complete set of the pictures would be a start. The paintings themselves can be seen at the Maryhill Museum of Art, Goldendale, Washington, USA.

• RH Ives Gammell by Elizabeth Ives Hunter
• Transcending Vision; details of a 2001 exhibition

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Stella Langdale, 1880–1976

Still from Blowjob by Andy Warhol (1963).

Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now opens today at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, and runs until 27 January 2008.

Seduced explores the representation of sex in art through the ages. Featuring over 300 works spanning 2000 years, it brings together Roman sculptures, Indian manuscripts, Japanese prints, Chinese watercolours, Renaissance and Baroque paintings and 19th century photography with modern and contemporary art.

Seduced presents the work of around 70 artists including Nobuyoshi Araki, Francis Bacon, Jeff Koons, Robert Mapplethorpe, Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt van Rijn and Andy Warhol among others. Stimulating the mind and the senses, provocative and compelling, Seduced provides the historical and cultural framework to explore the boundaries of acceptability in art. Seduced is curated by Marina Wallace, Martin Kemp and Joanne Bernstein.

• Barbican gallery selection
• Guardian gallery selection

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Male Gaze

Detail from La Havane by René Portocarrero; photo by C. Marker.

This week’s book finds are a pair of titles I hadn’t come across before in these particular editions, another haul from the vast continent that is the Penguin Books back catalogue. Labyrinths I’ve had for years in a later edition (see below) but the cover of this one seems more suited to Borges (as much as he can be illustrated) than the somewhat bland Surrealism of illustrator Peter Goodfellow. René Portocarrero (1912–1985) was a Cuban painter with a post-Picasso style who specialised in hallucinogenic profiles like the one here. And it’s a guess but I’d bet the “C. Marker” who photographed the painting is French filmmaker Chris Marker (who I compared to Borges last year), director of La Jetée and Sans Soleil. Marker worked as a photo-journalist for many years and made a documentary entitled ¡Cuba Sí! in 1961.

Peter Goodfellow’s work appeared on many fantasy and science fiction covers in the late Seventies and early Eighties. He painted covers for the complete run of Penguin reprints in this series from 1984 which also includes Doctor Brodie’s Report, A Universal History of Infamy and The Book of Sand. Most of these were pastiches, based on paintings by Dalí, Bosch, de Chirico and the engravings of Andreas Vesalius. I used to wonder what happened to Goodfellow whose work seemed to disappear some time in the late Eighties; a quick search reveals that he moved to Scotland to paint the mountains.

Photo-collage by Alan Aldridge.

Today’s other purchase was this 1967 edition of Genet. Alan Aldridge produced a few covers for Penguin and other publishers at this time, often with mixed results. His brand of cloying psychedelic whimsy was more suited to his Beatles illustrations than JG Ballard’s apocalypses or Genet’s travails through poverty and prison. This cover restrains his usual impulses and departs from his airbrush style by mixing Michelangelo statues with (possibly) some muscle-mag figures. And there’s a coincidental connection with the Goodfellow Borges paintings since Aldridge has also sampled from Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. What all this has to do with Jean Genet—aside from the lazy equation that both Michelangelo and Genet were gay—is anyone’s guess.

Photo by Emil Cadoo; design by Roy Kuhlman.

Far more successful Genet covers were Roy Kuhlman’s designs for Grove Press which included this hardback edition from 1963. Kuhlman, who died earlier this year, created over 700 (!) designs for the publisher and provided covers for editions of Genet’s plays as well as his novels. The woodtype typeface (of which the Rubens font is a contemporary equivalent) was used on several of the novels, sufficiently identifying that lettering style with Genet for it to be carried over onto subsequent paperback reprintings (below).

The AIGA has a page dedicated to Kuhlman’s career.

Photo by Roger Phillips.

The paperback editions of Querelle, Our Lady of the Flowers and Funeral Rites which Panther Books published in 1969 are still the most striking Genet covers I’ve seen. As is usual with paperbacks, no designer is credited but all three followed the same format of dark backgrounds with the Grove Press-derived typeface. Panther produced many great covers in the Sixties and Seventies, from literary titles to science fiction and horror; some of the latter can be seen in this collection.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Penguin designer David Pelham talks
• Sans Soleil
• Un Chant D’Amour by Jean Genet

I posted an old James Joyce portrait sketch for Bloomsday a couple of days ago and today decided to rework it as a vector graphic. This is the result. I was producing a lot of sketches like this while working on Reverbstorm a decade ago, most of them post-Picasso/Bauhaus/De Stijl variations. Joyce is particularly easy to render in a semi-abstract form on account of his distinctive features and apparel: hat, glasses, nose, moustache and bow tie. The Reverbstorm series is still in the process of being reworked as a single volume so this will probably find a home there.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #3 (1992).

Following from the post about an art forgery exhibition (and Eddie Campbell discussing his American Gothic cover for Bacchus), I thought I’d post some of my own forgeries, or pastiches as we call them when no deception is intended.

Reverbstorm was the Lord Horror comic series I was creating with David Britton for Savoy in the 1990s. The Modernist techniques of collage (as in the work of Picasso and others) and quotation (as in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land) became themes in themselves as the series developed, so it seemed natural to imitate the styles of various artists as we went along. Pastiche is also a chance to flagrantly show off, of course, and I can’t deny that this was also one of my impulses here.

Issue #3 of Reverbstorm had marauding apes as its theme, from the Rue Morgue to Tarzan and King Kong, so I had the idea of doing an ape cover in the style of the celebrated paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593) which make human heads out of fruit, flowers or animals. Easy enough to have the idea but making it work took a lot of effort and required careful sketching beforehand, something I rarely do. The painting was gouache on board, a medium I’d been using for years and this was about the last gouache work I did before switching to acrylics.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #4 (1994).

Despite admiring Aubrey Beardsley’s work for years, this was the first time I attempted to consciously imitate his style. The end result has never looked all that Beardsley-esque to me (see another attempt below) but it did produce one of my best Lord Horror drawings.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #5 (1994).

Reverbstorm #5 is the Picasso issue and the story switches drawing styles throughout using variations on different periods of Picasso’s career. The cover spread was a riff on Guernica which is a key motif in the series as a whole. This was acrylic on board, with some chopped-up postcards collaged at the top and bottom. You can see James Joyce’s head beside the bull on the left and Lord Horror and Jessie Matthews (based on the interior panel below) on the far right.

Jessie Matthews in Reverbstorm #5.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #6 (1996).

The second Beardsley pastiche with James Joyce, Jessie and Horror in masquerade costumes. The bull and horse from Guernica can be seen stipled into the background. Michael Moorcock included this drawing in the 50th anniversary edition of New Worlds magazine. (The date for this is later than the pictures below since two issues were created out of sequence, a typical piece of Savoy unorthodoxy.)

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #6 (1995).

At the end of issue 6 we see Joyce take a book down from a shelf, The Weird of Spring-Heeled Jack, written by his brother (William Joyce/Lord Horror in this mythology). The book is labelled as being illustrated by Harry Clarke which was my idea when I decided I wanted to do a Clarke pastiche. As with the Arcimboldo painting, having the idea was the easy part, the actual drawing took about two weeks to complete.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #7 (painted 1994; issue appeared 2000).

This painting is an attempt at doing comic artist Burne Hogarth (copying his famous drawing of Tarzan astride a raging lion) in the style of fantasy artist Frank Frazetta and is acrylic on board again. I’d originally put one of my perennial black suns at the top of the picture but amended that later in Photoshop by filling it with the Reverbstorm lightning flash and a flare effect.

Baptised in the Blood of Millions (painted 1997; book published 2001).

When I came to do the cover for David Britton’s third Lord Horror novel he gave me a sketch he wanted reproduced in the style of Frazetta so I went all out with this one and did a big acrylic painting on canvas. The end result is more Frazetta-like than the Reverbstorm cover (it owes a lot to Frazetta’s Bran Mak Morn painting) and also contains some Francis Bacon-like smears which Dave was very pleased with.

The tentacles in this painting have led it to being incorporated in my Lovecraft volume, The Haunter of the Dark, along with a selection of other Lord Horror pieces including the Harry Clarke drawing. Meanwhile Reverbstorm is slowly being reworked as a single volume, other work permitting, although the completion date for that is still some distance away. Naturally, any news about it will be posted here in due course.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• T&H: At the Sign of the Dolphin
• Fantastic art from Pan Books
• Guernica, seventy years on
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

Harlequin Disturbs Sleeping Fish by John Myatt
in the style of Joan Miró (no date).

Fakes and Forgeries: The Art of Deception is an exhibition at the Bruce Museum, Connecticut, running from May 12th–September 9th 2007.

For its major spring/summer exhibition, the Bruce Museum explores a subject that is exceptionally topical in today’s art world. Fakes and Forgeries: The Art of Deception presents 60 examples of Western paintings, works on paper, sculpture and decorative arts that have been recognized as imposters, including examples of the rarest and most famous deceptive works.

Fakes and Forgeries: The Art of Deception reveals the strategies and techniques of the world’s most successful forgers and exposes the extraordinary lengths to which they went to produce authentic-looking artworks. It also addresses techniques used to expose these deceptions, including X-ray fluorescence, pigment analysis, spectrography, dendrochronology, and carbon dating.

The exhibition presents Western painting and sculpture that has been faked from all periods of art, starting with fakes from antiquity and moving chronologically through the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque eras, exposing forgeries ranging from medieval sculpture and quattrocento gold backs to the rare art of Vermeer.

Christ and His Disciples at Emmaus by Han van Meegeren
in the style of Jan Vermeer (1937).

What exactly is a fake or a forgery? Perhaps the biggest problem in this field is the complexity of determining what constitutes an authentic work versus a vast array of faked, forged, copied, attributed, misattributed and replicated work. A fake is a work that replicates an existing work of art; it may be a deliberate deception or simply not the real thing. A forgery is a work that mimics the style of an artist or replicates his signature in a deliberate attempt to deceive.

Paintings in this exhibition that have fake signatures include forgeries of Edouard Manet, Juan Gris, and Giorgio de Chiricio; the etching Le Bain purportedly by Picasso also bears a forged signature. One of the show’s highlights is Han van Meegeren’s legendary forgery, Christ and His Disciples at Emmaus, in the style of Johannes Vermeer, which is arguably the most famous forgery in the world.

Bruce Museum
One Museum Drive
Greenwich
CT 06830
USA

Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1937).

• The legacy of Guernica (the event)
• Echoes of Guernica (the painting)

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 like the word “definitive”. But it’s certainly the first of its kind.

Everyone knows something about surrealism, the most popular art movement of the 20th century. The word has spread so far that people now say “surreal” when all they mean is “odd”, “totally weird” or “unexpected”. No doubt this would give heartburn to André Breton, the pope of the movement nearly a century ago, who took the title from his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had called his play The Breasts of Tiresias, “a surrealist drama”. But too late now. The term is many years out of its box and, through imprecision, has achieved something akin to eternal life. Surrealist painting and film, that is. In fact, some surrealist images have imprinted themselves so deeply and brightly on our ideas of visual imagery that we can’t imagine modern art (or, in fact, the idea of modernity itself) without them.

Think Salvador Dalí and his soft watches in The Persistence of Memory. Think Dalí again, in cahoots with Luis Buñuel, and the cut-throat razor slicing through the girl’s eye, as a sliver of cloud crosses the moon (actually, the eye belongs to a dead cow, but you never think this when you see their now venerable but forever fresh movie An Andalusian Dog, 1929). Think of photographer Man Ray’s fabulous Cadeau Audace (’Risky Present’, 1921), the flatiron to whose sole a row of tacks was soldered, guaranteeing the destruction of any dress it would be used on. Think of Rene Magritte’s The Rape, that hauntingly concise pubic face, with nipples for eyes and the hairy triangle where the mouth should be. Think of the shock, the horniness, the rebellion, the unwavering focus on creative freedom, the obsessive efforts to discover the new in the old by disclosure of the hidden.

But surrealist design? It seems almost a contradiction in terms. “Design” for us is strongly identified with industrial process, with modules, with the rationalisation of process into clear repeatability. To “design” something implies that it can be made not just once, but again and again and again, without loss of quality and intensity, like a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair or the old Parker 51 fountain pen. That an object is “designed” implies, or seems to, that every aspect of it from the first pencil scribble to the finishing touch and on to its intended use by the proposed consumer has been thought about and brought into full consciousness. It would therefore seem so remote from the spirit, the modus operandi, of surrealism as to have nothing to do with it. And to a great extent, it is. Something in surrealism, in the cult of the surrealist object, positively insisted that the thing should not have dwelled in experience before, and yet should be (mysteriously) a real thing in the real world, and preferably an old one (though not an antique). This meant either that it should have lost its context and even, if possible, the memory of that context, so that it appeared to the entranced eye of the spectator as something both filled with the ghosts of prior meanings and yet inexplicably new: an apparition of (urban) magic. It followed that most surrealist objects depended for their poetry on total uselessness. And how do you design something quite useless? You don’t. You create it. Hence the complete opposition between this show and the display of “Modernism” presented at the V&A last year, surveying the track of classical modernist design. Surreal Things is an inspired but logically necessary sequel: the rest of the apple.

Spectre of the Gardenia (1933) by Marcel Jean.

“Classical” modernist design—of furniture, rooms, and things in general—was usually done with one eye on the possibility of serial production. Surrealist design was most emphatically not. Practically everything called surrealist was one-off, even when it didn’t absolutely have to be. I’m not sure the word “design” really applies to some of the objects in the show, such as Marcel Jean’s Spectre of the Gardenia, 1933. This was a fusion of junk-shop resurrections. The head, though hardly recognisable as such, was a plaster cast of the 18th-century French sculptor Houdon’s portrait of the royal mistress, Madame Dubarry. Jean then turned her into a negress by covering the head with glued-on cloth, painted black. The eyelids became small zip-fasteners, opening horizontally to reveal tiny photos (a star, a face) where the pupils might have been. This fetishistic mask would have later echoes, such as the black leather S&M masks produced by the now almost forgotten American sculptor Nancy Grossman, whose work caused a brief sensation in New York in the 1970s. But on “design” as generally understood, such things as Marcel Jean’s head had no effect at all.

When it came to trying to decide the surreality of a thing or an image, the only question was: does this detach itself, stand out, from the world of common things around it? Does its oddity and apartness so distinguish it from the contents of the rest of the world that it promises access to a different sort of reality? Not a matter of newness (for looking new was of slight importance to surrealism), but rather of intensity and strangeness. Some surrealists fantasised about creating a canon of things that could, and just as importantly could not, be called surrealist. Man Ray toyed with the thought that “some kind of stamp or seal” might be invented to distinguish “the poem, the book, the drawing, the canvas, the sculpture, or the new construction” from all other things that were not certifiably surrealist. Naturally, this could not be done. Any effort to establish such copyrights was bound to fail. In fact, the only surrealist object that might, conceivably, have found a market niche for itself was the sofa designed by the English collector Edward James in tandem with Dalí: the justly famous pink sofa in the shape of Mae West’s lips. One could imagine a few takers for that hilariously voluptuous parody-object back in 1938, when the prototype was made, and it seems likely that more people would want one today.

People tended to assume that surrealism was mainly a Franco-Hispanic phenomenon, but nothing is quite so simple. There were English surrealists—indeed, you might say their appearance in the country of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll was ordained by fate. The most spectacular of them was, of course, James. He was one of the great English architectural extravagants, a reborn Walpole whose Strawberry Hill was a house in Sussex named Monkton. This startlingly idiosyncratic home had begun as a shooting lodge designed by Sir Edward Lutyens for James’ father, William, in 1902. By the time James and his Catalan friend Dalí were through with it (not that it was ever “finished”), it had become one of the strangest houses in 20th-century England, its outside covered in purple stucco, with faux-bamboo downpipes and, inside, wall-to-wall carpet woven with the menacing paw-prints of James’s pack of wolfhounds. Mother Nature made her appearance in such forms as a standing lamp made of a python, which James père had shot on one of his African safaris, and a fully grown, stuffed polar bear, which would later be dyed shocking pink and presented to Elsa Schiaparelli; it presided for a time over her Paris showroom, where it must have given her clients a certain frisson.

Where was the dreaming mind, always open to suggestion, to find the strange objects that could find and deserve a place in a surrealist scenario? Where but in the city, that great condenser of memory and experience? Nature was not what surrealism wanted; it wasn’t interested in the delights of the pastoral—in fact, it didn’t think them particularly delightful. It was above all a city affair. Surrealism always had at the back of its mind the definition of beauty-as-incongruity proposed by the crazily eccentric writer Isidore Ducasse, who wrote under the name of the Comte de Lautréamont: “Beautiful,” that worthy said, “as the chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”

Still Life (1933) by Man Ray.

The true surrealist city, the ground of all the movement’s imaginings, was of course Paris, that limitless and incomparable collage of things abutted in all their multitude of undeclared, secret, enigmatic relations. Not for nothing did the surrealist poet Louis Aragon call a book Le Paysan de Paris, implying that he had come to know the million and one images accumulated by the city, and that he tilled and fertilised them laboriously as a farmer works his soil. Paris was still a much stranger place in the 1920s than it could ever be today. Much of the old pre-Haussmann mystery still clung to its intestinal alleys and the glass-roofed arcades, where rejected things shrank from view behind grimy windows and then, scrutinised with a new eye, suddenly burst into a second life. To preserve the shock of that eyeblink transformation—that was the aim of the surrealist thing-maker. The “palette of objects” available to him (or her) was enormously variegated and rich, not least because junk was junk a hundred years ago—not potential “antiques”.

One of the merits of this show is that it’s the first (at any rate, the only one I’ve seen in more than four decades of reviewing) to take serious account of the relations between surrealism and the luxury arts—fashion design, interior decor, sales display, jewellery, and their various impresarios. By shifting the angle of view a little, as this show does, it is possible to see that these activities, if not intrinsically as important to surrealism as the painting or sculpture, certainly made big additions to the movement’s spirit, and that they did so through people not always included among the creators of surrealist work. One was the great designer Jean-Michel Frank, mainly known for his ultra-refined art deco furniture executed in such exotic materials as palisander, zebra wood and ivory inlays, but who turns out to have been, through his friendship with the poet René Crevel, a considerable surrealist “animator” in his own right. Moreover, it wasn’t the designers alone who created the various surrealist “looks”—a large part was played by their often highly receptive and creative clients, such as Charles de Beistegui. Not all of them, however, went along with the designers’ proposals. Who could? Dalí came up with what still sounds like a fairly repellent proposal for an animated armchair—”It will have life. It will breathe. There will be a mechanism which will follow the breathing of the human body.” There is no record that one of these gizmos was ever built—fortunately, perhaps, since one would not wish to be relaxing in it when the machinery went cuckoo, as it surely would have done after a few hours’ use.

Not so many years ago, liaisons between surrealism on one hand, and on the other the rich and chic and the businesses that served them, were almost always held by right-thinking, Marxist-leaning, avant-gardist people to be immoral affairs. They trivialised the very name of the artist. Fashion, particularly Paris couture, was by definition no part of proletarian Utopia; but come the revolution, which was, of course, right round the corner, giraffe-legged socialites from the 16th Arrondissement would not be tittuping about in gauzy taffetas and webs of gilded copper braid of the sort that Schiaparelli sent down her runway in 1949—no, it would be the virtuous austerities of cotton denim for them, and maybe a spanner stuck in the belt for a chic accessory. It didn’t happen like that, of course. Quite the reverse. “I have seen a young woman on the boulevard,” wrote Apollinaire, a poor art critic but a great poet, and one of the hearth-gods of surrealism, “dress in tiny mirrors that are appliquéd to the fabric. In sunlight the effect was dazzling. It was like a walking gold mine. Later it began to rain, and the lady looked like a silver mine … Fashion becomes practical, scorns nothing and ennobles everything. It does for substances what the Romantics did for words.”

Lee Miller photographed by Man Ray.

Fashion was sexy. So was surrealism. They were a natural fit. Nobody ever called cubism sexy, or constructivism, or any of the other movements of the early 20th century except German expressionism, which did have its sexy moments—though not so very many of them. But one of the core beliefs of the surrealists, as set forth by their leader, Andre Breton, was in l’amour fou, obsessional love, the kind of love that deranges the senses and tips those who feel it into a helpless vortex of appetite and feeling. Surrealism had its own cast of star women, seemingly imperishable love objects, all dead now, whose images nevertheless endure thanks to the photos of Man Ray, George Hoyningen-Huene and others. The most beautiful and desirable of them all was a first-rate photographer herself: the blonde American Lee Miller, who lived with Man Ray for a time in Paris and was one of the chief muses of surrealism. Her lips can be seen floating in the sky like some wondrous UFO above the breast-like domes of the Paris Observatory in Man Ray’s painting A l’heure de l’observateur. Sometimes it can be difficult to share the past’s enthusiasm for the sex-bombs of yesteryear, and Mae West, less a sex object than a parody of sexuality, is (at least for me) a case in point. But Miller, one of the most gorgeous American beauties of the 20th or any other century, was a wholly different matter.

When not gazing raptly on such Heloises, the yearning Abelards of surrealism invested a lot of energy in creating all sorts of sexual images, some of which—despite the huge expansion of pornography in modern life—have never been surpassed for conciseness and intensity. The young Jewish artist Meret Oppenheim made several. One was a startling re-use of a pair of white women’s shoes, which, bound tightly together and presented upside-down on a silver platter with paper chef’s frills on the high heels, became a sort of erotic chicken. But the most famous of Oppenheim’s works was Object, 1936, which grew out of an accessory design she had done for that principal patron of surrealist “thing-making”, Elsa Schiaparelli. For the brilliant couturier, Oppenheim had done a gold metal bracelet covered (on the outside) with beaver fur. She wore it to meet Picasso for drinks at the Café de Flore, and Picasso remarked that if you could have a fur bracelet then practically anything else could also be covered with fur, and so transformed. Why not a coffee cup, for instance? So Oppenheim went right ahead, with cup, spoon and saucer, and the result was one of the few really sublime sexual images of the 20th century. It compels you to imagine raising this furry cup, wet with hot fluid, to your lips; it offers no possible meaning other than cunnilingus; it is exquisitely graceful and inescapably direct, both at once, and if ever a single work was enough for one artist’s career, it is Oppenheim’s cup.

Object (1936) by Meret Oppenheim.

The romantic sexuality of surrealism expressed itself most frequently in one of its key images, the fashion dummy—not a statue, not a person, but a curiously haunting thing that carried reminiscences of high art—Giorgio de Chirico, whose piazzas and slanting shadows were haunted by these ambiguous manikins, was another of surrealism’s adopted ancestors. The use of mannequins covered a lot of territory, and a startling variety of moods. Sometimes they could be replaced by human models, particularly when some transgressive point needed to be made; the artist Oscar Dominguez installed one of these girls, passively reclining like some inordinately pretty creature who was nevertheless doomed to be rejected and thrown out, lying in a wooden wheelbarrow, which, in deference to her chic, was comfortably padded and lined with purple satin. But this use of the live human body favoured incongruities. One was a fashion shot for Harper’s Bazaar, in 1939, by Hoyningen-Huene, which showed a slender, beautiful model posed in front of Max Ernst’s The Fireside Angel. The creature one saw looming over her was one of Ernst’s most diabolic inventions—a ravening foretaste of nazism, a monster whose body is twisted into the unmistakable form of a hackenkreuz, or swastika, and not by any means (or so one might have thought) the sort of image that would make the magazine’s readers think “couture”. It was, however, the inanimate model—its status shifted towards that of a mere doll—that contained the most sinister possibilities of debasement and disturbance. The maestro here was Hans Bellmer, a somewhat bizarre sexual obsessive who loved mulling over themes of child rape, dismemberment, and general sexual nastiness behind the psychic woodpile.

Doll (1936) by Hans Bellmer.

Like Oskar Kokoschka before him, Bellmer made himself a human-sized doll. Unlike Kokoschka’s rag-and-stuffing effigy of Alma Mahler, however, Belmer’s doll represented not a grown-up woman but a prepubescent child. It did not commemorate anyone in particular, at least nobody whose name we know, but it was filled with the most intense significance for him. Jointed, modular, endowed with intricately modeled, hairless genitals, Mary Jane shoes and more than the ordinary number of limbs, capable of being twisted into all manner of postures and configurations, it was (literally) a parent’s nightmare and a sadist’s dream. Bellmer would set it up in various places, mostly threatening ones—corners of a wood, dark patches of grass. Then he would take photos of it. The images were apt to look like police evidence shots of crime scenes: plain, frank, not arty, not cleaned up. They spoke of dislocation, torment, violation and abandonment. This was, by the standards of the day, fairly sinister stuff, and its suggestion was far stronger than what it actually represented.

Surrealism itself was divided on the issue of what relation, if any, it should have to commerce. It was all very well to say, as some did, that the movement was born of a marriage of Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxist critiques of capitalism; certainly there had been a long flirtation with Trotsky on the part of some surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s, and others—including, disgracefully, Aragon in his over-the-top hymn of hate “The Red Front”—became outright Stalinists. But artists have to earn a living. In 1926, both Max Ernst and Joan Miró did backdrop designs for a production of Romeo and Juliet, by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. This earned them furious denunciations from Breton, Aragon and Picasso. “The moment you see a cheque you collaborate with reactionary White Russians! So much for that famous rigor of yours!” But such expostulations were not, in the end, terribly convincing. Most of the surrealists, including Breton, made their living by dealing, “art advising”, involvement in photography, advertising and the fashion industry. Indeed, without the patronage of fashion, it is hard to see how surrealism would have made its way in Paris at all.

Dalí, in particular, received a lot of flak for his relations with the rich. But he never made any pretence about this, unlike Picasso, whose communist sympathies were mostly wind. “Picasso is a genius!” Dalí would later exclaim. “Me too! Picasso is a Spaniard! Me too! Picasso is a communist! Me neither!”

At least old Avida Dollars (Breton’s clever anagrammatic nickname for him) tried to deceive no one, but his attitudes to filthy lucre were still misunderstood, sometimes willfully. Why would Dalí have turned to designing jewellery in the 1950s, collaborating with such jewellers as Fulco di Verdura and the Argentinian Carlos Alemany? Because, the received wisdom went, he was under the thumb of his mercenary harpy of a wife, Gala, whose demands for cash were so unrelenting and, in the end, so debilitating; because he had run out of ideas, and so was compelled to repeat his old ones (which were cliches by now, anyway) in different and grander materials than mere oil paint; and so on.

There was some truth to this. Gala was indeed a bullying ogress; practically nothing in the last half-century of Dalí’s painting life compares to the achievements of his genius up to, say, 1930, and the worst of late Dalí is unredeemable garbage. And yet, there was still some fire behind the moustache, and it flared up in such Dalí-designed jewels as the 1949 brooch in the form of a woman’s mouth made of pavé rubies, the lips slightly parted to reveal two rows of pearl teeth; or, better yet, the astonishing starfish he made in 1950 for a mid-western multimillionairess, an ultra-toy with five articulated arms made of rubies, diamonds, pearls, emeralds and gold, which has some claim to be the most impressive luxury object made in the 20th century. (You could bend its arms any way you liked, and they would stay in place; the catalog includes a photo of its owner, one Rebecca Harkness of Minnesota, wearing it on her breast, clinging there like a parasite for plutocrats, as if in possession of its host.)

But the most impressive jewel in the show is not by Dalí or any other “name” surrealist artist. It was designed and made by the Paris firm of Maison Boivin, through whose portals there strode one day in 1938 a rootin’-tootin’ Texas lady bearing the skull of a longhorn ox, picked up on her ranch. This, she declared, was to be the model for a brooch. And so Boivin made it: pavé diamonds all over, a wreath of emerald leaves cascading from one eye socket, a purple sapphire ribbon, polished gold horns. The whole thing more than four inches high. Just the objet to wear behind the wheel of your solid-gold Cadillac, with a couple of granite-jawed Texas Rangers riding shotgun. “Private collection”, the catalog says chastely. No bloody wonder.

One thing’s for sure: 50 years from now, nobody is going to be comparably impressed by the mingy, dispiriting trinkets cranked out by Tiffany with the names of Frank Gehry and Paloma Picasso on them. Not that anyone could be today, come to that. One of the effects of this show is to make you realise how sharply the very idea of decadence itself has decayed since the end of surréalisme au service de la luxe. The pressure of style has gone out of it, deflating it, leaving it somehow formless, gross and squishy, like so much of our sad and brutishly noisy culture.

• Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design is at the V&A, London SW7, from March 29 to July 22. Details: 0870 906 3883.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealist Revolution
• Surrealist Women
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Surrealist cartomancy

Image-heavy post! Please be patient.

Four designs for three bands, all by the same designer, the versatile and brilliant Barney Bubbles. A recent reference over at Ace Jet 170 to the sleeve for In Search of Space by Hawkwind made me realise that Barney Bubbles receives little posthumous attention outside the histories of his former employers. Since he was a major influence on my career I thought it time to give him at least part of the appraisal he deserves. His work has grown in relevance to my own even though I stopped working for Hawkwind myself in 1985, not least because I’ve made a similar transition away from derivative space art towards pure design. Barney Bubbles was equally adept at design as he was at illustration, unlike contemporaries in the album cover field such as Roger Dean (mainly an illustrator although he did create lettering designs) and Hipgnosis (who were more designers and photographers who drafted in illustrators when required).

Colin Fulcher became Barney Bubbles sometime in the late sixties, probably when he was working either part-time or full-time with the underground magazines such as Oz and later Friends/Frendz. He enjoyed pseudonyms and was still using them in the 1980s; Barney Bubbles must have been one that stuck. The Friends documentary website mentions that he may have worked in San Francisco for a while with Stanley Mouse, something I can easily believe since his early artwork has the same direct, high-impact quality as the best of the American psychedelic posters. Barney brought that sensibility to album cover design. His first work for Hawkwind, In Search of Space, is a classic of inventive packaging.

Update: BB didn’t work with Mouse in SF, I’ve now been told.

Hawkwind: In Search of Space (1971).

It’s fair to say that Hawkwind were very lucky to find Barney Bubbles, he immediately gave their music—which was often rambling and semi-improvised at the time—a compelling visual dimension that exaggerated their science fiction image while still presenting different aspects of the band’s persona. In Search of Space is an emblematic design that opens out to reveal a poster layout inside. One of the things that distinguishes Barney Bubbles’ designs from other illustrators of this period is a frequent use of hard graphical elements, something that’s here right at the outset of his work for Hawkwind.

This album also included a Bubbles-designed “Hawklog”, a booklet purporting to be the logbook of the crew of the Hawkwind spacecraft. I scanned my copy some time ago and converted it to a PDF; you can download it here.

The In Search of Space sleeve unfolded.

Gracious! by Gracious! (1970).

The shifting identity of Barney Bubbles means that many works such as this are omitted from listings. Gracious! was one of the first releases on the Vertigo label and the design was credited to “Teenburger”. The bold exclamation mark is printed on textured (bubbled?) card while the interior (below) featured a three-dimensional Richard Hamilton-style tableau. This band also connects Barney Bubbles and Roger Dean, another artist whose work was increasingly used by Vertigo. The second Gracious! album featured a Dean cover which kept the exclamation mark design.

Gracious! gatefold interior.

Dr Z: Three Parts to My Soul (1971).

In the 1970s even the most obscure bands could receive lavish cover treatment. This more typical design for the Vertigo label had two flaps that opened out from the centre with a heart-shaped hole cut in the middle.

Hawkwind: Doremi Fasol Latido (1972).

I hadn’t realised until I started assembling these images how much Barney’s work seemed to go through phases of influence. For the third Hawkwind album he must have been looking at the kind of superhero comic art exemplified by Jack Kirby. The Doremi cover is a black and white drawing (printed in silver ink on the original sleeve) done in the style of Kirby’s familiar reflective metal strips. The inner sleeve was even more Kirby-like although less successful, a squadron of barbarians on horseback with a sacked city burning in the distance and flying saucers drifting overhead. The fold-out poster below was free with initial pressings.

Hawkwind: Star Rats—poster with the Doremi album (1972).

Hawkwind: Urban Guerilla single ad (1973).

This artwork in this ad design was part of a series of black and white posters all created around the time of the Doremi album that still exhibited the bold influence of Jack Kirby. This particular picture, however, is lifted directly from a Lone Sloan strip by French comic artist Philippe Druillet, Les Iles du Vent Sauvage (1970). (You can see part of the drawing on this page.) I later swiped from Druillet myself so I’m not one to criticise. In fairness, the comic strip figure only had the helmet and the shield, Barney adds an elaborate sword and a new background.

Update: thanks to comments from Rebecca and Mike below, I was reminded of the title of the picture above and so was able to find the poster version and its companions. You can see all five posters here.

Fanon—Dragon Commando.

Prince Minksy’s chopper.

Edgar Broughton Band: Oora (1973).

Hawkwind: Space Ritual (1973).

The definitive Hawkwind design and one of my favourite album covers. Barney’s work had now moved away from comic books into a kind of cosmic Art Nouveau with the band’s dancer, Stacia, here presented in the style of Alphonse Mucha. The lion heads were based on a head in Mucha’s L’Emeraude from 1900. Mucha also favoured a combination of illustration with hard graphics so it’s easy to see why Barney would respond to this. Much of the Hawkwind ad art of the time features Mucha-styled borders.

Space Ritual is justly celebrated for its poster sleeve which opens out to six panels. Barney’s graphics for the interior were developments of the work he created for the Hawkwind logbook, a blend of drawn or painted graphics with “significant” photos, in this case Edwardian erotica, atomic structures, a foetus floating among stars, etc. The example below is crudely composited from the CD reissue; it was too much effort to photograph the original sleeve and it doesn’t make much difference at this size anyway.

The Space Ritual tour programme also came as a fold-out poster, featuring a pulpy sf story and pictures of the band among the Mucha flourishes. Once again, I made my copy into a PDF which you can download here.

Hawkwind: Love & Peace poster (circa 1973).

The Mucha influence continued in this promotional poster whose figure and design is based on the Champagne White Star artwork for Moet & Chandon (1899).

Hawkwind: Hall of the Mountain Grill (1974).

The most illustrational of all his Hawkwind sleeves and a picture that could easily have worked as one of his monochrome designs.

Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers: Bongos Over Balham (1974).

The sleeve for Mike Moorcock’s Deep Fix album below was (according to Moorcock) a real wooden fairground booth that Barney constructed, painted then photographed.

Michael Moorcock & the Deep Fix: New Worlds Fair (1975).

Hawkwind: The 1999 Party—tour poster (1975).

The shift of emphasis in the mid-Seventies was away from Art Nouveau towards Art Deco poster graphics, a style evident in all the 1999 Party tour artwork and the two sleeves that follow.

Hawkwind: Roadhawks (1976).

Hawkwind: Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music (1976).

The final Hawkwind design isn’t just Art Deco, it’s almost fascist, looking like a piece of Soviet propaganda art topped by a Nazi eagle. Hawkwind singer Bob Calvert spoke of the band being reorganised after this album along the lines of “a Stalinist purge” so maybe the design is appropriate.

1976 was the year of a Stalinist purge in British music as a whole. With the advent of punk Barney successfully made the transition from hippy designer to punk designer. If anything, punk gave him a new leash of life as his tremendous sleeve for the second Damned album demonstrates. His association with Stiff Records and Radar Records was the second major phase of his career after Hawkwind and gave him the opportunity to explore a range of influences from early 20th century design.

The Damned sleeve is a Kandinsky-esque portrait of the band with the group’s name spelled out using abstract shapes, an approach to album lettering he was to use for other artists as the decade progressed. I was especially taken with this album at the time and referred to it in an exam essay I had to write about album covers.

The Damned: Music For Pleasure (1977).

The very wide letter spacing used on the titles of these albums was a common feature of his Stiff designs, one of a number of habitual effects that became prevalent in work from subsequent designers.

Clover: Unavailable (1977).

Hawklords: 25 Years On (1978).

Hawkwind became Hawklords for one album and a tour in 1978. Barney was commissioned to help create the stage show and develop the vague science fiction concept of Pan Transcendental Industries around which the album was based. The result was a very up-to-the-minute presentation which the band discarded immediately afterwards. This was Barney’s last work for Hawkwind. I’ve always found this cover distinctly erotic but I doubt you want to know about that here.

Nik Turner’s Sphinx: Xitintoday (1978).

Sax player Nik Turner was thrown out of Hawkwind in the 1976 band purge but he remained friends with Barney Bubbles. When Turner came to record his solo album, Xitintoday, Barney was asked to create the packaging. The album is a concept affair based around the Egyptian Book of the Dead but Barney’s design for the sleeve and accompanying booklet avoids hippy cliches with a use of abstract graphics or arrangements of lettering; the cover design, for example, features stars made up of the word “twinkle”. The pair continued to work together for Turner’s later band, Inner City Unit.

1978 was also the year Barney was asked to help with the redesign of the NME. His new logo remained in use up to the late 80s and forms the basis of the current (degraded) logo design.

Whirlwind: Blowing Up A Storm (1978).

Ian Dury & the Blockheads: logo design (late 70s).

The association with Stiff Records led to one of Barney’s most famous works, the Blockhead logo. If he’s remembered for anything it should be for this simple, brilliant and witty graphic.

Ian Dury & the Blockheads: Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick (1978).

Ian Dury & the Blockheads: Do It Yourself (1979).

His inventiveness came to the fore again with his cover designs for Ian Dury. This sleeve was printed in twelve different versions onto real sheets of wallpaper. The design acts not only as a comment on the home improvement alluded to in the title but also a request for the purchaser to make a choice of their own among the different styles.

Radar Records logo (1978).

Elvis Costello & the Attractions: This Year’s Model (1978).

Initial pressings were made to look like deliberate misprints, showing CMYK colour bars and cutting off the letters of the artist name and title, a quirk abandoned on subsequent editions.

Elvis Costello & the Attractions: Armed Forces (1979).

The David Shepherd-style elephants on this cover do little to hint at the exceptional interior design, probably Barney’s most extravagant work since Space Ritual, and certainly its equal. The sleeve opens out to further extend the interpretation of the title and includes Mondrian and Jackson Pollock stylings among its animal-print abstractions. To save page-loading time there’s a page here where you can see the full effect for yourself. Thanks to LondonLee for the photos.

Update: Tim Niblock in the comments notes that this package was produced in association with Bazooka Graphics, France.

The Imperial Pompadours: Ersatz (1982).

Not many people know Barney Bubbles had a band. The Imperial Pompadours was Barney plus Nik Turner and other members borrowed from Inner City Unit. They recorded this one unhinged rock’n'roll album on a very restricted budget. Read The Seth Man’s review of it here.

Elvis Costello & the Attractions: Almost Blue (1981).

Work at Radar continued with covers for all the early Elvis Costello albums. Almost Blue prefigures the look of many sleeve designs that came later in the decade while Imperial Bedroom featured a painting of Barney’s pastiching Picasso (“Snakecharmer & Reclining Octopus by Sal Forlenza, 1942”). Despite his increasing success and a growing reputation among younger designers these were to be his last works. Friends say he’d always been something of a depressive and late in 1983 he evidently reached some kind of crisis and took his own life. Roy Carr wrote an obituary for the NME.

Elvis Costello & the Attractions: Imperial Bedroom (1982).

Barney Bubbles’ work is continually featured in histories of album cover design but he was more than just a cover designer. We’re overdue a decent book-length examination of his work and his influence.

Update: The book is on its way. And David Wills’ new blog features his reminiscences about art school life with Barney. Good things come to those who wait.

Update 2: Reasons to be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles by Paul Gorman was published by Adelita on December 4th, 2008. Paul Gorman writes about it here and I featured an extract here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records
• Oz magazine, 1967–73
• The lost art of sleeve design

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 watch more television.

Leonora and me

Leonora Carrington ran off with Max Ernst, hung out with Picasso, fled the Nazis and escaped from a psychiatric hospital. Joanna Moorhead travels to Mexico to track down her long-lost cousin, one of Britain’s finest—and neglected—surrealists.

Joanna Moorhead
Tuesday January 2, 2007
The Guardian

A few months ago, I found myself next to a Mexican woman at a dinner party. I told her that my father’s cousin, whom I’d never met and knew little about, was an artist in Mexico City. “I don’t expect you’ve heard of her, though,” I said. “Her name is Leonora Carrington.”
The woman was taken aback. “Heard of her? My goodness, everyone in Mexico has heard of her. Leonora Carrington! She’s hugely famous. How can she be your cousin, and yet you know nothing about her?”

How indeed? At home, I looked her up, and found myself plunged into a world of mysterious and magical paintings. Dark canvases dominated by a large, sinister-looking house; strange and slightly menacing women, mostly tall and wearing big cloaks; ethereal figures, often captured in the process of changing from one form to another; faces within bodies; long, spindly fingers; horses, dogs and birds.

I remembered from childhood hearing stories about a cousin who had disappeared “to be an artist’s model”. But the truth was infinitely richer and more thrilling. Leonora Carrington, born into a bourgeois family, eloped at the age of 20 to live with the surrealist artist, Max Ernst (married, and some 20 years her senior). The couple fled across war-torn Europe in the late 1930s, and she later settled in Mexico, where she continued to paint, write and sculpt.

Most excitingly, though, Leonora was still alive – aged nearly 90 and living in a suburb of Mexico City with her husband, a Hungarian photographer. I contacted my Carrington cousins and discovered that one of them had visited her a couple of years ago: she was, he reported, on amazing form, and still working. I wrote to ask whether she’d be prepared to meet. Word came back that she would, and a few weeks later I flew to Mexico City.

Leonora Carrington looks eerily like my father – the same piercing eyes, the same trace of an upper-class English accent. We met at her house, and she led me through her dark dining room, crammed with her sculptures, to the kitchen where we were to spend most of the next three days, chatting endlessly over cups of Lipton’s tea (”I hardly touch alcohol,” she told me. “Enough people in our family have died of drink. Anyway I smoke, and it’s too much to drink and smoke.”)

Leonora was born in 1917, the only daughter (she had three brothers) of textile magnate Harold Carrington and his Irish wife, Maurie Moorhead, my grandfather’s older sister. Harold and Maurie were very different characters: where he was entrepreneurial, Protestant and a workaholic, Maurie was easy-going, Catholic and open-minded. The family home was an imposing mansion in Lancashire, Crookhey Hall – the sinister house that features in many of her paintings.

Leonora was expelled from three or four schools, but the one thing she did learn was a love of art. Her father was not keen on her going to art college, but her mother intervened and she was allowed to go and study in Florence. There, she was exposed to the Italian masters, whose love of gold, vermilion and earth colours were to inspire her later work.

She returned to England brimming with enthusiasm for the artist’s life, but her father had other ideas. As far as he was concerned, she had sown her wild oats and now needed to come back to earth. This meant launching her as a debutante: a ball was held in her honour at the Ritz, and she was presented to George V. A few years later, in a surreal short story The Debutante, she poured out her loathing of “the season”, with a witty description of sending a hyena along to take her place at her coming-out ball.

In 1936, the first surrealist exhibition opened in London – for Leonora, something of an epiphany. “I fell in love with Max [Ernst]’s paintings before I fell in love with Max,” she says. She met Ernst at a dinner party. “Our family weren’t cultured or intellectual – we were the good old bourgeoisie, after all,” she says. “From Max I had my education: I learned about art and literature. He taught me everything.”

Leonora and Ernst left London and settled in an apartment in Paris. Their life was complicated – he was still spending time with his wife – but for Leonora there was a sense of freedom after the claustrophobia of London, and she plunged dizzily into Picasso’s Paris.

Picasso is just one of the artists she came to know. “A typical Spaniard – he thought all women were in love with him,” she remembers. And were they? “Well, I certainly wasn’t. Though I liked his art.” And then there was Salvador Dalí: “I met him by chance one day in André Breton’s shop. He certainly wasn’t extraordinary then: he looked like everyone else. It was only when he went to America that he started looking extraordinary.” Dalí liked her – “a most important woman artist,” he called her. She didn’t much like Man Ray, “though I liked his girlfriend Ady Fidelin. What she saw in him, I’ll never know – it certainly wasn’t his looks.” The couple knew Joan Miró – “He gave me some money one day and told me to get him some cigarettes. I gave it back and said if he wanted cigarettes, he could bloody well get them himself. I wasn’t daunted by any of them.” In Paris, Leonora found her real family, an artistic community she felt connected with, and equal to.

In 1938, Ernst finally left his wife, and he and Leonora moved to Provence. The photographer Lee Miller was a frequent guest, and we look at some of Miller’s pictures together: I tell her that Ernst has an impish look about him. She smiles warmly: “But remember, I was much younger than him. I could out-imp even him!” They had become one another’s muses – though she laughs when she hears I was told she had run off to become an artist’s model. “I was never his model!” she snorts. She painted him, and he painted her: it was a time of great creativity for them both and, with Ernst’s encouragement, Leonora began to write as well as paint.

Their idyll was brought to a shattering conclusion with the arrival of the Nazis, and Ernst’s subsequent internment as an enemy alien. In her memoir, Down Below (Virago, 1989), Leonora describes her suffering after Ernst was taken away. She fled to Spain, had a breakdown and ended up in a psychiatric hospital in Santander.

Back home in Lancashire, my father remembers the worried conferences about what had happened to her. Eventually, Leonora’s father sent a business contact to get Leonora out of hospital in Santander, put her on a ship to South Africa, and have her admitted to a sanatorium there, instead. But waiting for the boat in Lisbon, Leonora gave her father’s minders the slip and escaped through the back door of a cafe. She jumped into a taxi and said the first thing that came into her head: “Take me to the Mexican embassy!”

One of her friends in Paris had been a Mexican diplomat, Renato Leduc, a friend of Picasso’s, who was now in Lisbon. His solution to her predicament was to marry her, to get her away from the clutches of her family, and from Europe.

While they were waiting in Lisbon for the boat to the US, Ernst arrived in town, now liberated and with the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, who had fallen hopelessly in love with him. Also in their entourage were Peggy’s ex-husband, Ernst’s ex-wife and a collection of children. A master of understatement, Leonora described those weeks as they waited to go to New York as “very weird”. Her own affair with Ernst was not reignited.

After a few months in New York, Leonora and Leduc dissolved their marriage of convenience and she moved to Mexico, where, a few years later, she met and married her husband, Csizi (”Chiki”) Weisz. Six decades on, they are still together. “How old is he?” I asked her. “Goodness knows,” she fired back, with her usual quick wit. “He’s been saying he’s 95 for about eight years. I haven’t the faintest idea.” The couple have two sons, Gabriel and Pablo.

Mexico gave Leonora the space and opportunity to sculpt and to paint, and – with its Aztec and Mayan history and its cult of the dead – a fresh and rich seam of inspiration. There were new artists to share ideas with: Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (she liked her better than him, she says); and the artist to whom, apart from Ernst, she has been closest in her life, Remedios Varo.

Today, Leonora’s life combines the domestic concerns of an elderly wife with the preoccupations of the international artist. One minute she is dispatching the nurse for Chiki’s drugs: the next deciding whether to use acrylic or wax for the model of her next big sculpture, commissioned by a multinational bank (her commissions come mainly from Mexico and north America). She doesn’t enjoy sculpting as much as painting: sculpting, she says, is inevitably corrupted by all the other people who need to be involved, and made tedious by endless hassles with the foundry. “With painting it’s just you and the canvas.” Still, she frets about whether she will be able to go on painting: she seems to both long for and dread the moment when she will pick up her paintbrush again. When I ask her how a painting comes about, what the impetus is, she fixes me with the Moorhead stare. “You don’t decide to paint. It’s like getting hungry and going to the kitchen to eat. It’s a need, not a choice.”

Over the years, she has had to sell most of her paintings, and now regrets that she has only two. She takes me to a locked room off her roof garden and puts them on an easel; but as soon as I ask her about them, she whisks them away and ushers me back downstairs. She refuses to be drawn into any analysis of why she has painted what she has.

Back in England, I talk to Matthew Gale, a curator at Tate Modern, about Leonora’s significance as an artist, and detect an embarrassment that the Tate owns only two of her works, both pen and ink drawings. “In many ways, Britain has acted in the same way as your family,” he says. “She has been neglected: apart from the collector Edward James, who bought many of her paintings, and an exhibition at the Serpentine in the 1980s, she’s had very little exposure here. But all the time, she’s been building up a massive international reputation, so suddenly we’re scrabbling around to catch up, to put her in her rightful place in her native country.”

Her importance, he says, lies partly in that she – along with artists such as Leonor Fini and Remedios Varo – opened up a new, and more female, strand of surrealism: in Mexico, Leonora and Varo dabbled in alchemy and the occult, and the work of both was rooted for a time in the magical and domestic elements of women’s lives. “One of the extraordinary aspects of Leonora’s work is how she draws on so many different inspirations, from the Celtic legends she learned from her nanny, through the constraints of her upper-class upbringing, to the surrealism of Paris in the 1930s – and then to the magic of Mexico,” Gale says. “Her work is evocative of so many things, and it’s enormously complex: she hasn’t had a massive output because her technique is so meticulous and the work so detailed. She certainly wasn’t a Picasso who could churn out several pictures a day; her work would take many months, even years.”

When I tell Leonora about my conversation with Gale, she is thrilled. I hear the mischievous note in her voice that once so infuriated her father, and delighted Max Ernst. “So, they think they should have more of my work, do they?” she says. “Good! That’s made my day!”

We say goodbye, and I imagine her heading back to the kitchen for another cup of tea and a cigarette. Maybe, as she sits there, she will allow herself a few moments back in 1930s Paris, or one of those long, hot days in Provence with Ernst. Maybe she will go back further, to the family she felt first suffocated her ambitions, and then shunned her. And maybe, just maybe, she will find it in her heart to forgive them. She was, after all, the best of us; it is going to be Leonora whom history remembers.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Surrealist cartomancy

New Year by Picasso (1953).

Happy new year.

02007? Read this.

A 35-minute color film by Cocteau entitled La Villa Santo Sospir. Shot in 1952, this is an “amateur film” done in 16mm, a sort of home movie in which Cocteau takes the viewer on a tour of a friend’s villa on the French coast (a major location used in Testament of Orpheus). The house itself is heavily decorated, mostly by Cocteau (and a bit by Picasso), and we are given an extensive tour of the artwork. Cocteau also shows us several dozen paintings as well. Most cover mythological themes, of course. He also proudly shows paintings by Edouard Dermithe and Jean Marais and plays around his own home in Villefranche. This informal little project once again shows the joy Cocteau takes in creating art, in addition to showing a side of his work (his paintings and drawings) that his films often overshadow.

La Villa Santo Sospir, 1952, 250 mb, (AVI)

The film is in French but Ubuweb provide a subtitle file if you know how to use those. This isn’t really essential however (despite the copious narration), the film is more concerned with giving the viewer a guided tour of the villa and its decorations. Fascinating seeing Cocteau working with colour even though many of the drawings and murals on display are his characteristic black lines on a white field. Nice also to see again his habitual delight with cinematic trickery in the reverse-motion sequences, wiping a blank canvas with a cloth so that a drawing appears, or piecing together living flowers from fragments of stalk and petal.

Tom Phillips has long been one of my favourite contemporary artists and he’d certainly be my candidate for one of the world’s greatest living artists even though the world at large stubbornly refuses to agree with this opinion. Phillips’ problem (if we have to look for problems) would seem to be an excess of talent in an art world that doesn’t actually like people to be too talented at all (unless they’re dead geniuses like Picasso) and a lack of the vaunting ego that propels others into the spotlight.

Phillips is predominantly a painter but a restlessly experimental one. On my journey through the London galleries in May I visited the National Portrait Gallery, a rather dull place mostly filled with pictures of the rich and famous by the rich and famous. There were two Tom Phillips works on display in different rooms, inadvertently showing his artistic range: one, a fairly standard (if very finely detailed) portrait of Iris Murdoch, the other a computer screen showing a portrait of Susan Adele Greenfield which manifested as an endlessly-changing series of 169 processed drawings and video stills. One work was static and traditional, the other fluid, contemporary and completely unlike anything else in the building.

But Phillips isn’t only a painter, of course, he produces sculptural works, books such as The Postcard Century (presenting samples of his voluminous postcard collection) and many others, is the author of an experimental opera, IRMA, and co-author (with writer WH Mallock) of the extraordinary A Humument where “the artist plays Pygmalion with WH Mallock’s A Human Document (1892)” by drawing and painting over every single page of a Victorian novel leaving certain words visible, thereby creating a completely new text. A detail of one of his paintings, After Raphael, was used by ex-art pupil Brian Eno as the cover for Another Green World. He also provided the cover art for Eno’s Thursday Afternoon. Eno has said:

It’s a sign of the awfulness of the English art world that he isn’t better known. Tom has committed the worst of all crimes in England. He’s risen above his station. You can sell chemical weapons to doubtful regimes and still get a knighthood, but don’t be too clever, don’t go rising above your station.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another. It’s the same in pop—once you’ve got your brand identity, carry on doing that for the rest of your days and you’ll make a lot of money. Because Tom’s lifetime project ranges over books, music and painting, it looks diffuse, but he is a most coherent artist. I like his work more and more.

Phillips produced the cover for one of King Crimson’s best albums, Starless and Bible Black, adorning it with a display of his habitual stencil lettering and an enigmatic phrase from A Humument, “This night wounds time.” His obsession with Dante has led him to translate The Inferno in order to produce an illustrated edition and in the late Eighties he collaborated with Peter Greenaway on A TV Dante, a marvellous adaptation for television screened in the UK by Channel 4.

Of all his works, one of my favourites remains his ongoing 20 Sites n Years.

Every year on or around the same day (24th May–2nd June) at the same time of day and from the same position a photograph is taken at each of the twenty locations on this map (above) which is based on a circle of half a mile radius drawn around the place (Site 1: 102 Grove Park SE15) where the project was devised. It is hoped that this process will be carried on into the future and beyond the deviser’s death for as long as the possibility of continuing and the will to undertake the task persist.

The intention is that photographs (35 mm transparencies) be taken at twenty locations each year between May 24 and June 2. The locations are situated on what is (in 1973) the nearest walkable route to a perfect circle a half a mile in radius from the point in the home of Artist 1 (102 Grove Park, London SE5) where the project was devised and where these instructions were written. The circuit is divided into sixteen equal sections in each of which there is a site selected by Artist 1. Four other locations mark the route from the centre to the circumference: these are the former studio of Artist 1, his current home and studio, and the art school where he studied. The project book notes the times of the original photographs of 1973 and these should be adhered to as closely as possible (though all photos need not necessarily be taken on the same day) Artist 1 intends that the pictures should be taken by his family and their descendants, if they are willing, and that the work should thus go on indefinitely: the services of their friends may be enrolled or even from time to time that of professional photographers. Continuity is the most important factor.

The result is an evolving pictorial history of a very mundane area of south London; as the pictures accumulate the city begins to flex and change before our eyes like a living being. By turning his attention to ordinary streets rather than grand buildings Phillips has shown us the degree to which our living space is in a continual state of flux as well as revealing curious psychogeographic resonances, like the tank that goes down a road in 1982 when the Falklands War was in progress.

As so often in 20 Sites no pattern or plan is discernible in the changes made to things or their positioning or even their existence. A bench will move here and there, and will disappear altogether to come back again after a while: if indeed 20 Sites is seen as a microcosm of the nation as a whole then an awful lot of people, especially those working for the municipality, are involved in totally random and arbitrary activity. They seem to cancel out each other’s work in a long dance of job protection. It is difficult otherwise (apart from the signals-to-aliens theory) to account for the preparation of a flower bed in 1973 whose display reaches its peak in 1975, goes to seed in 1976, is erased in 1977 to remain more and more vestigially visible until in 1987, when, as if to mark the tenth anniversary of its abandonment, a Christmas tree is planted (by chance or artistry) dead centre of its virtually invisible circle. It made little progress in 1989 and still looks sketchy in 1992.

Every time I look at these pictures I wish I had the discipline to attempt something similar since one could easily clone the project for other cities. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before someone attempts this elsewhere (assuming they haven’t already) although whether they can sustain the activity the way Phillips has done remains to be seen. His specification that the work should be continued after his death is already assured since his son has been an active participant for some years. I’m curious as to how they’ll proceed in the future now that film cameras are becoming an endangered species (Phillips specifies the type of camera and film stock to be used).

Thames & Hudson publish three books of Phillip’s work, the essential Works and Texts (which includes details of 20 Sites n Years), The Postcard Century and A Humument (now in its fourth edition). If there was any justice in the world, Tate Modern would honour him with a major retrospective. But there isn’t so they won’t.

‘Adele Bloch-Bauer I‘ (1907) by Gustav Klimt.

A dazzling gold-flecked 1907 portrait by Gustav Klimt has been purchased for the Neue Galerie in Manhattan by the cosmetics magnate Ronald S. Lauder for $135 million, the highest sum ever paid for a painting.

The portrait, of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a Jewish sugar industrialist and the hostess of a prominent Vienna salon, is considered one of the artist’s masterpieces. For years, it was the focus of a restitution battle between the Austrian government and a niece of Mrs. Bloch-Bauer who argued that it was seized along with four other Klimt paintings by the Nazis during World War II. In January all five paintings were awarded to the niece, Maria Altmann, now 90, who lives in Los Angeles, and other family members.

Although confidentiality agreements surrounding the sale forbid Mr. Lauder to disclose the price, experts familiar with the negotiations, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he paid $135 million for the work. In a telephone interview Mr. Lauder did not deny that he had paid a record amount for the painting, eclipsing the $104.1 million paid for Picasso’s 1905 “Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice)” in an auction at Sotheby’s in 2004.

“This is our Mona Lisa,” said Mr. Lauder, a founder of the five-year-old Neue Galerie, a tiny museum at Fifth Avenue and 86th Street devoted entirely to German and Austrian fine and decorative arts. “It is a once-in-a-lifetime acquisition.” He said Christie’s had helped him negotiate the purchase.

Pablo Picasso, Vallauris, France, 1954 by Arnold Newman.

Portrait of Charles Henri Ford in Poppy Field by Pavel Tchelitchew (1933).

View magazine was an American periodical of art and literature, published quarterly from 1940 to 1947 with heavy emphasis on the Surrealist art of the period. The jaw-dropping list of contributors included: Pavel Tchelitchew, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, André Masson, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Paul Klee, Albert Camus, Lawrence Durrell, Georgia O’Keefe, Man Ray, Jorge Luis Borges, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Jean Genet, René Magritte, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, and Edouard Roditi.

The editor was Charles Henri Ford, one of those mercurial polymaths who seemed to know everybody of significance in the world of arts and letters which explains how he could summon such an extraordinary roster of contributors. Ford made a splash initially in 1933 when he co-wrote what’s generally regarded as the first gay novel, The Young and Evil, with Parker Tyler. This received guarded praise from Gertrude Stein (Ford’s writing was influenced by Stein and Joyce) who later said it was “the novel that beat the Beat Generation by a generation”, and the book was sufficiently frank about the lives of its Greenwich Village characters to be banned in the US until the 1960s.

The tragedy of all magazines is that they flourish for a period then are quickly forgotten, no matter how much impact they may have made in the general culture. View was published in limited runs which means individual copies now command high prices. At a time when other forms of media are being continually resurrected, magazines fall by the wayside; museums and libraries collect them but they remain out of view of the world at large. The web has been slowly alleviating this problem: editions of Oz are now available for online browsing and there’s a complete copy of the “Americana Fantastica” issue of View here. You can also see the incredible Aspen magazine over at the wonderful Ubuweb. Fingers crossed that somebody eventually gives us the rest of View.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – JANUARY 1943 (SERIES II, NO.4)
Cover by Joseph Cornell.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 1943 (SERIES III, NO.3)
Cover by Andre Masson.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 1943 (SERIES III, NO.4)
Cover by Pavel Tchelitchew.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MAY / SUMMER 1944 (SERIES IV, NO.2)
Cover by Georgia O’Keeffe.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – FALL 1944 (SERIES IV, NO.3)
Cover by Fernand Leger.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – FALL 1944 (SERIES IV, No.4)
Cover by Esteban Frances.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MARCH 1945 (SERIES V, NO.1)
Cover by Marcel Duchamp.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MAY 1945 (SERIES V, NO.2)
Cover by Wilfredo Lam.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 1945 (SERIES V, NO.3)
Cover by Morris Hirshfield.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – NOVEMBER 1945 (SERIES V, NO.4)
Cover by Leon Kelly.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 1945 (SERIES V, NO.5)
Cover by Andre Masson.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MARCH 1946 (SERIES VI, No. 1)
Cover: Brancussi’s studio.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 1946 (SERIES VI, No. 2)
Cover by Rene Magritte.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MARCH / SPRING 1947 (SERIES VI, NO.3)
Cover by Pavel Tchelitchew.

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Something I’ll definitely be going to see, especially given the emphasis on Georges Bataille. Above: André Masson’s cover design for the first issue of Bataille’s Acéphale (1937).

UNDERCOVER SURREALISM: Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of Georges Bataille. The Hayward Gallery, London, 11 May–31 Jul 2006.

This major Surrealist show, curated by Surrealism specialist Dawn Ades, documents the extraordinary cross-currents of Paris in the late 1920s, through painting, film, sculpture, music, photography, masks, ritual objects – all subject to the provocative vision of Georges Bataille.

Featuring works by Miró, Dalí, Giacometti, Brancusi, Boiffard, de Chirico, Arp, Nadar and Ernst, and an entire room of works by Picasso, it brings together loans from major collections around the world.

Bataille waged war on the “idealism” of the Surrealist movement, using his famous magazine DOCUMENTS as his weapon. Undercover Surrealism takes his magazine’s subversive juxtapositions as its starting point, and shows how Bataille unflinchingly exposed the raw underbelly of the human creative impulse.

The Hayward Gallery first explored Surrealism almost 30 years ago in its legendary 1978 show, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, co-curated by Dawn Ades. Ades, now regarded as one of the world’s greatest Surrealism experts, returns to curate this exhibition.