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Skull Vision by Michael Ayrton (1943).
The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art: great title for an exhibition, a shame that it’s all the way down in Cornwall at Tate St Ives.
This group exhibition takes its title from the infamous 1962 book by St Ives artist Sven Berlin. It will explore the influence of [...]

Photography by Steven Klein, styling by Nicola Formichetti.
Not a Tom Waits album, Bondage Machine is the title of a feature in Vogue Hommes Japan which plays with bondage and fetish imagery to striking effect. What’s not to love about a huge skeletal necklace and leather underwear? Fetish gear is the aesthetic dimension of erotica and [...]

An obscure occult artist even among catalogues of obscure occult artists, Julien Champagne (also listed as Jean-Julian) is known principally for his associations with the persistently elusive 20th century alchemist Fulcanelli. Champagne provided a frontispiece (below) for Fulcanelli’s examination of architectural symbolism, Le Mystère des Cathédrales (1926), and is continually rumoured to have been Fulcanelli [...]

I’ll be Your Mirror (2005).
Not quite finished with the Moon since it’s visible in the background of Juliet Jacobson’s beautiful drawing, together with some other items of recurrent {feuilleton} concern: masturbating males, peacock feathers and human skulls. Pam at Phantasmaphile has a larger copy of this work while Ms Jacobson’s site has a number of [...]

The Glass Chair.
Today’s glass artists continue to astonish. Andy Paiko’s one-off creation above is a chair whose vitrines contain a rhesus monkey skull, a piece of octopus coral, a murex spiny trumpet shell, the skeleton of a rat, and a mountain lion skull. The piece below contains a 24 carat gold-plated coyote skull with the [...]

A collection of skeletal carvings from the 17th and 18th century at LUNA Commons.
Update: Well they were there but the database seems to have been rearranged and these photos removed.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Skull cameras
• Walmor Corrêa’s Memento Mori
• The skull beneath the skin
• Vanitas paintings
• Very Hungry God
• History of the skull as [...]

For the Love of Disruptive Strategies and Utopian Visions in Contemporary Art and Culture No.2 by James Cauty.
I usually wouldn’t bother writing about the over-rated and over-valued Damien Hirst—I’ll leave that to heavyweights such as Robert Hughes—but one story this week toasted the cockles of my black and cynical heart. Before we get to that, [...]

Lux on stage in Glasgow, 1990.
Lux Interior, co-founder of the Cramps and the group’s singer, lyricist, cultural archaeologist and a superb stage performer. Also one of the few people who could successfully enthuse about the delights of female sexuality while wearing nothing more than a pair of high heels and a black G-string.
That exhilarating manifestation [...]

Third Eye Camera.
Two camera artworks by Wayne Martin Belger, aka Boy of Blue.
Yama is made from Aluminium, Titanium, Copper, Brass, Bronze Steel, Silver, Gold, Mercury with 4 Sapphires, 3 Rubies (The one at Yama’s third eye was $5000.00), Asian and American Turquoise, Sand, Blood, and 9 Opals inlayed in the Skull. The film loading system [...]

“Jim Cawthorn and I have been inseparable for over twenty-five years, sometimes to the point where I can’t remember which came first—the drawing or the story. It is his drawings of my characters which remain for me the most accurate, both in detail and in atmosphere. His interpretations in strip form will always be, for [...]

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 [...]

Venom (2003).
The work of Angelo Filomeno, an Italian artist based in New York, is just the kind of thing I like to see: insects, skulls and bones in a luscious presentation. The sculpture below is made of glass while the flat works are silk embroidery with crystals as part of the decoration. There’s a [...]

 
Dorian (Richard Winsor) photographed by Bill Cooper.
Matthew Bourne’s new dance version of Dorian Gray opens today at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London, and I’d have been interested in this production even without visions like the ones above and below; the eye candy merely adds an additional frisson and, let’s face it, there’s always been [...]

Untitled photo print.
A fantastic exhibition of photographs, drawings and engravings by Raymond Carrance, aka Czanara, opens today at Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art, New York, running until June 21, 2008. For those of us who can’t get to see it there’s a selection of the works on show at their site which immediately increases [...]

All Is Vanity by Charles Allan Gilbert (1892).
The surreptitious skull is another of those perennial motifs that recur in art from time to time and one which has become especially prevalent since the late 19th century. There seem to be a number of reasons for this, the most obvious being that if you’re going to [...]

Charles Darwin’s walking stick from the Wellcome Collection.
Happy Darwin Day.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Prince Iskandar’s horoscope
• Vanitas paintings
• Giant Skeleton and the Chocolate Jesus
• Very Hungry God
• History of the skull as symbol

Earth, looking suitably infernal.
Out this evening to the Zion Centre in Hulme to see Seattle drone metal band Earth. I didn’t get to see their performance at the 2005 Arthurfest in Los Angeles but this event made up for that. Support—which we missed due to late arrival—was from Sir Richard Bishop, whose portrait I [...]

It’s always nice when something you’ve worked on turns up in the post and there’s been a double helping of that this week with the arrival of the Chaoticum CD and the catalogue for the Maison D’Ailleurs exhibition. Since both of these are either partly or wholly connected to HP Lovecraft, their simultaneous arrival is [...]

The horoscope of Prince Iskandar, grandson of Tamerlane, the Turkman Mongol conqueror, by Imad al-Din Mahmud al-Kashi, showing the positions of the heavens at the moment of Iskandar’s birth on 25th April 1384.
From the Wellcome Trust image collection. Considering the Wellcome Trust’s medical background, there’s a surprising amount of non-scientific material in its image library, [...]

An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768).

As promised, one of my favourite chiaroscurists. The impression Joseph Wright’s work made on me at the age of 13 was one of many revelations from my first visit to the Tate Gallery. The paintings which struck me most of the older works there were all [...]