The Shaman.

Gorgeous drawings from this American artist, none of which are as innocent as they first appear. Some of my friends with Wunderkammer obsessions will be interested in the three-dimensional constructions detailed on her blog and her Flickr pages.

Via Phantasmaphile.

Arsenic.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Juliet Jacobson

It’s a curious feeling when a drawing which is nearly 26 years old makes it out into the world. The image above is the cover of a new 7″ single release, Dominion of Avyaktam by metal band Orator, the picture being something I drew in 1984 entitled Mahakala after the Tibetan deity which it depicts. The inspiration was the cover of another recording, a Nonesuch Explorer album, Tibetan Buddhism – Tantras Of Gyütö: Mahakala, and also the track Mahakala by 23 Skidoo from their 1983 album The Culling is Coming. The skull is drawn from a real one I was given. Looking at this today none of the elements seem to work together—and the landscape stuff looks like a lazy way of filling in space—but it’s nice to see it find a home. Dominion of Avyaktam is out now on the Legion of Death label.

• Surprise of the week: two books I’ve worked on were nominated for Nebula Awards, Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch, and Kage Baker’s The Hotel Under the Sand whose interior I designed.

• More music: a recording of Paul Schütze’s Third Site played live in 1999 (with Clive Bell, Raoul Björkenheim, Simon Hopkins & Thomas Köner’s voice) is now available as a free download on his website. More Schütze: Paul Schütze & Simon Hopkins playing a set at the Horbar in Hamburg on December 28, 2009.

• The incredible pinscreen animations of Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker are finally available on DVD. Also new to DVD, Alan Bennett at the BBC, a four-disc set of some of his TV plays including a particular favourite of mine, his Kafkaesque drama The Insurance Man.

• More Ghost Box business: Jon Brooks aka The Advisory Circle has a blog. And Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp was interviewed recently by Peter Bebergal at Mystery Theater. Related (forgot to mention this last week): The ASDA Mix, a great mixtape of spooky retro weirdness by Moon Wiring Club available for free at The Wire.

• The trailer for Mellodrama, a documentary about the Mellotron by Dianna Dillworth.

• The Parajanov Festival will be screening some of the director’s films in London and Bristol.

• Lots of weird and wonderful exhibits at the ~Wunderkammer~.

“He was a Brothers Grimm of fashion, enchanting and captivating the audience with the most incredibly beautiful clothes, only to make their stomachs lurch with the underlying menace that shot through his work. Because every show contained outfits designed to thrill, shock – and catch the eye of picture editors – many people never realised that much of McQueen’s work was, quite simply, heart-stoppingly gorgeous: exquisite tailoring, beautifully sculpted dresses and glorious print.”
Jess Cartner-Morley. (More.)

Butterfly-print dresses (how fitting for Darwin Day), Giger-style shoe designs, skull key chains… Yes, Alexander McQueen was something special.

Guardian obituary | Independent obituary

Song of Retail #1 (Pink Skull Monkey) (2004).

Retail might be more interesting if it involved pink monkeys beating skulls. There’s more at Laurie Hogin’s website and at Littlejohn Contemporary. Via Chateau Thombeau.

Diorama with Palliated Species (2007).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The  fantastic art archive

Dragon Skull Ring.

Jewellery by Swedish designer Maria Nilsdotter. Looking at her blog posts I’d guess that her snake bangle is inspired by the serpentine ring and bracelet set designed by Alphonse Mucha and Georges Fouquet for Sarah Bernhardt.

Snake bangle (blackened silver).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Divine Sarah
• Lalique’s dragonflies

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 folklore, mysticism, mythology and the occult on the development of art in Britain. Focusing on works from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day it will consider, in particular, the relationship they have to the landscape and legends of the British Isles. (More.)

Artists featured include Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Ithell Colquhoun, Cecil Collins, John Piper, Leslie Hurry and John Craxton. Among the contemporary artists there are Cerith Wyn Evans, Mark Titchner, Eva Rothschild, Simon Periton, Clare Woods, Steven Claydon, John Stezeker and Derek Jarman. Austin Osman Spare is notable by his absence but then that’s no surprise, the major occult artist of the 20th century never rates more that a passing mention from the art establishment. One nice surprise is seeing Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988) featured in her second major British exhibition this year. (Her work is also present in the Angels of Anarchy exhibition running at the Manchester Art Gallery.) Colquhoun was a contemporary of Spare’s whose work turns up in occult encyclopaedias or overviews of the minor current of British Surrealism but she’s still largely unheard of outside those circles.

The Tate exhibition may be awkward to visit but there’s an illustrated catalogue available featuring contributions from quality writers including Brian Dillon, Philip Hoare, Jon Savage, Jennifer Higgie, Marina Warner, Michael Bracewell, Alun Rowlands and Martin Clark. Michael Bracewell has a piece about the exhibition at Tate Etc while Brian Dillon has an excellent essay in the Guardian connecting John Dee’s mysterious obsidian scrying mirror with some of the works on display.

Untitled by David Noonan (2009).

• Artist of the week: David Noonan
• Ithell Colquhoun at A Journey Round My Skull

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism
• A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N
• In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman

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 it’s always nice to see new manifestations of the form even when, as in this case, it’s largely about fashion designers flirting with the edge of acceptability.

Via the essential Homotography.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bad Boy

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 himself. Whatever the solution to that mystery, the alchemist’s book is rather more visible than the artist’s distinctly Symbolist paintings. There’s a French blog devoted to his life and works here but little else around. I wouldn’t mind seeing a decent online gallery of his pictures at some point.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Digital alchemy
• The art of Pamela Colman Smith, 1878–1951
• The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Austin Osman Spare

I’ll be Your Mirror (2005).

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

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 work as a whole being described by the artist as representing various stages of the alchemical process. Go and feast your eyes on the rest of his creations. Thanks again to Thom for the tip!

Canis Auribus Tenere.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Josiah McElheny
• The art of Angelo Filomeno
• IKO stained glass
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• Glass engines and marble machines
• Wesley Fleming’s glass insects
• The art of Lucio Bubacco
• The glass menagerie

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 symbol

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, some context is required.

Hirst unveiled his diamond-coated platinum skull, For the Love of God in June 2007. Later that month, artist John LeKay complained that Hirst swiped the idea from LeKay’s series of crystal skulls made in the early Nineties. Hirst certainly knew LeKay at that time and interviewed him for a gallery catalogue in 1993.

(LeKay) said: “I would like Damien to acknowledge that ‘John really did inspire the skull and influenced my work a lot’. Damien’s very insecure about his originality. He used to say, ‘You’re a better artist than me’.

“He can be affectionate and is fun to be around, but he struggles to come up with ideas. It takes years of work to develop something. My stuff with crystals took a lot of research. You don’t just get there. He’s impatient. He’s a lazy artist.”

This wasn’t the first time Hirst was accused of laziness or even plagiarism. In 2000 he was sued for breach of copyright by Norman Emms after he made Hymn, an over-sized copy of Emms’ model for the Young Scientist Anatomy Set. That dispute was settled out of court only to be followed in 2006 with an accusation of theft by computer artist Robert Dixon who claimed that his geometric model of a flower, True Daisy, had been copied by Hirst for a piece entitled Valium. Judge the similarity for yourself.

Fast forward to December 2008 when a teenage graffiti artist who calls himself Cartrain created a collage which includes a photo of Hirst’s skull. The £200 that sales of this netted him also drew the attention of the Design and Artists Copyright Society and Hirst himself who demanded both the money and the artwork. Cartrain said:

I handed over the artworks to Dacs on the advice of my gallery. I met Christian Zimmermann [from Dacs] who told me Hirst personally ordered action on the matter.

I think this is the point where one has to start using the word hypocrite, don’t you? Others think so too, among them Jimmy Cauty (ex-KLF) and Sex Pistols sleeve designer Jamie Reid whose website Red Rag To A Bull describes itself as “a radical institution dedicated to the pursuit of “FREEDOM, TRUTH and JUSTICE in the art world and BEYOND”. And also overblown statements.” Inspired by Cartrain’s treatment, Cauty and co have been producing their own riffs on Hirst’s skull as a deliberate act of provocation. Cauty says, “Unlike Cartrain and his gallery, we are not intimidated by lawyers and if an injunction is issued, we will simply ignore it on the grounds of freedom of speech.” Reid calls Hirst a “hypocritical and greedy art bully”. There’s some funny stuff on their site, all of which is for sale as limited edition prints.

All of the works below are for sale and once TWENTY MILLION POUNDS has been raised ALL the proceeds will go to make an exact copy of a sculpture known as “For the Love of God”. This will then be sold for FIFTY MILLION POUNDS and the THIRTY MILLION POUND profit will then be used to repay the Street Urchin his 200 quid, help other Street Urchins and also feed starving children in Africa and Sussex.

Hirst will no doubt be grudgingly amused by the attention even if it is for behaving more like a grasping corporation than an artist. He’s also become the subject of another artwork by Eugenio Merino, For the Love of Gold, which depicts the corporate entity inside one of his vitrine tanks shooting himself in the head. All of which is silly and juvenile but then the only response much contemporary art deserves is a silly and juvenile one. People are naturally tempted to wave a red rag in the face of the pompous or the hypocritical. More power to them.

Update: Damien Hirst in vicious feud with teenage artist over a box of pencils

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 of deviant intent and skull-denting impact remains Lux and Ivy’s exclusive domain. Where punk rock was a barrage of refutation that fomented rabid exultation, the Cramps reclaimed the hillbilly power long since flushed down the Mersey. Through a self-stated “disdain for the myth of musical progress,” they melded their mutant propensities to emerge as a guiding voice in the wilderness, a commanding force that redefined the rock & roll spectrum while outgunning almost everyfuckingbody in the game. Jonny Whiteside, LA Weekly.

• The Cramps’ Lux Interior: A life in pictures
• The Cramps on The Tube, 1987: part 1 | part 2 | part 3

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 is pneumatic. A 300psi air tank in the middle of the camera powers 2 pneumatic pistons to move the film holder forward and lock it into place. The switch to open and close the film chamber is located under the jaw.

Yama (Tibetan Skull Camera).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The skull beneath the skin
• Darwin Day
• Vanitas paintings
• Giant Skeleton and the Chocolate Jesus
• Very Hungry God
• History of the skull as symbol

“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 me, the best.” Michael Moorcock.

Jim Cawthorn—illustrator, comic artist and fantasy historian—died this week. Cawthorn was the first illustrator employed by Savoy Books and one of the key factors in drawing me to their doors in the early 1980s. His illustrations made their books special and his comics adaptation of Moorcock’s The Jewel in the Skull was a big influence on my early black and white work.

Mike Moorcock, Dave Britton and I seem to be in a minority in regarding Cawthorn as one of the finest fantasy illustrators of his generation. His carefully stipled drawings of the late Fifties and early Sixties are all miniature masterpieces and I don’t care how many artists attempt lavish paintings of Moorcock’s Elric character, for me the definitive representation remains the drawing used on the cover of the first edition of Stormbringer in 1965. Cawthorn was Moorcock’s illustrator of choice for many years and was involved with the Moorcock-edited run of New Worlds right from the start with his cover illustrating Ballard’s Equinox story. He also provided reviews for New Worlds, and his critical faculties were demonstrated to the full in 1987 with Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, an overview of the genre credited to Cawthorn and Moorcock for which Cawthorn himself wrote most of the entries.

I wrote in more detail about Cawthorn’s work for the Savoy site several years ago. For an overview of his career and influences, there’s Dave Britton’s interview from 1979.

Update: some extra pictures added.

Jagreen Lern and Elric (1963).

The Metal Monster (1962).

The Jewel in the Skull (1978).

Moorcock portrait 1: The Apocalyptic (1979).

Moorcock portrait 2: The Aesthetic (1979).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

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

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 selection of the latter works here.

Cold (detail) (2007).

Incendiary Lovers (2005).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The skull beneath the skin
• Vanitas paintings
• Giant Skeleton and the Chocolate Jesus
• Very Hungry God
• History of the skull as symbol

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 an erotic component to dance and ballet however high-minded the intention. Bourne famously gave the world the a Swan Lake with male swans and in Dorian Gray updates Wilde in a very contemporary manner (following Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation and Duncan Roy’s recent film adaptation) with the gay subtext made an overt text.

Set in the image-obsessed world of contemporary art and politics, Matthew Bourne’s ‘black fairy tale’ tells the story of an exceptionally alluring young man who makes a pact with the devil. Amongst London’s beautiful people, Dorian Gray is the ‘It Boy’ – an icon of beauty and truth in an increasingly ugly world.

The destructive power of beauty, the blind pursuit of pleasure and the darkness and corruption that lie beneath the charming façade; the themes behind Oscar Wilde’s cautionary tale have never been more timely.

Richard Winsor again, photographed by Murdo Macleod.

Dorian Gray continues the gender-reversals with Lord Henry becoming Lady H, while Sybil Vane is transmuted to Cyril. I like the stage design detail where the customary nightclub glitterball becomes a version of Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted human skull, the expensive artworld bauble finding its own level at last as a piece of decoration. Updating stories in this way often provokes a feeling of ambivalence—removing the subtext can have the effect of diluting the tension which lies at the heart of the work—but the continual refashioning of Wilde’s fable has confirmed its status as a contemporary myth, something I’m sure he’d be very pleased about. In that respect, it gives the creator the immortality through art which his creation, in the closing pages of the story, is denied.

• Because Wilde’s worth it | Matthew Bourne discusses the production
• Review in The Independent
• Bill Cooper’s production photos
• Wilde at heart: Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray | Another photo gallery

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Osborne’s Dorian Gray
• Dorian Gray revisited
• The Poet and the Pope
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II

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 the web visibility of this artist by several orders of magnitude.

Carrance was a photographer and book illustrator who, working mostly in the 1950’s and 60’s, created a private body of homoerotic dreamscape’s under the pseudonym ‘Czanara’. The exhibit shines new light on Carrance’s art, which is certainly courageous and innovative, especially for its time.

One of the last great unknown erotic artists of the 20th century, his work is somewhat reminiscent of the magic realism style of the painters Paul Cadmus and Jared French, yet done in a photographic medium. Using overlays of abstract graphics over dreamy images of languid young men at play, his work is a meditative pondering of the artist’s psyche. The work is reverential, distinctly European, yet never exploitative.

Carrance, who lived from 1921–1998, was also responsible for illustrating with elaborate etchings and lithographs the works of Jules Renard and Cyrano de Bergerac, as well as an edition of Henry de Montherlant’s 1951 gay classic La Ville dont Le Prince est un Enfant (The Land Whose King is a Child). There will be examples of this riveting work, as well as his compelling drawings, on view as well. Having died with no heirs, his work was sold at auction by the French state, but luckily fell into the hands of a bookseller who we have to thank for it finally seeing the light of day.

Untitled engraving (c. 1950s).

Among the items worthy of note is the above engraving which is another version of the hermaphrodite angel picture I posted in March last year. The other engravings are equally fascinating, looking at times like gay equivalents of Hans Bellmer.

May 4, 1953.

There’s also the drawing above which raises a curious artistic conundrum by being very reminiscent of the work of comic artist Burne Hogarth. A couple of weeks after posting the Czanara angel picture I pointed out the similarity between the film poster for Premonition and one of Hogarth’s panels from Jungle Tales of Tarzan, both of which use the trick of making faces out of tree branches. (I also noted that Dalí was doing similar things before almost everyone else.) Czanara’s 1953 drawing not only contains very Hogarthesque figures but does the same thing with the branches to make a skull face. The curious thing here is that Czanara’s picture predates Hogarth’s Tarzan book by more than twenty years. It’s very unlikely that Hogarth would have seen Czanara’s work; given that Hogarth was made world famous by his Tarzan strips of the 1940s it’s more likely that Czanara knew Hogarth’s work although none of his Sunday strips contained these kind of pictorial tricks and I’ve not seen any example of Hogarth doing this in the 1950s. I also haven’t yet seen the recent book about Czanara so can’t say what light has been shed on his artistic influences. If anyone can solve this mystery (which may simply be coincidence, of course), please leave a note in the comments.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The skull beneath the skin
• A premonition of Premonition
• Czanara’s Hermaphrodite Angel
• The art of Paul Cadmus, 1904–1999

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 show how clever you are by hiding one image inside another you may as well make the hidden thing something that everyone recognises. A secondary reason would seem to be the waning power of the vanitas theme. As painting became more pictorially sophisticated it wasn’t enough to simply show a skull and expect people to accept that and a stern moral as the principal content. Hence the development of death as a non-skeletal character in Symbolism and the reduction of skulls in pictures to a kind of playful game.

Holbein’s anamorphic skull in The Ambassadors is probably the grandfather of all the later versions but the more recent popularity of the hidden motif can be traced back to Charles Allan Gilbert whose 1892 picture, All is Vanity, drawn when he was just 18, was sold to Life Publishing in 1902 and subsequently spread all over the world in postcard form. Despite giving birth to a host of imitators, Gilbert’s picture is the one that still inspires artists and photographers up to the present day.

A Pierrot’s Love (uncredited) (1905).

Another very popular version.

La Famille Impériale de Russie; French postcard (1908).

In Voluptate Mors by Salvador Dalí & Philippe Halsman (1951).

Dalí was the master of this kind of pictorial illusion, of course, and worked several of his own variations with skulls. The most famous is the Philippe Halsman photograph which was recapitulated in the poster art for The Silence of the Lambs in 1991 and, more recently, The Descent.

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot (1982).

Gilbert’s picture started to be reproduced as a poster from the Sixties on and eventually began influencing rock album sleeve art. There’s more than enough examples of these, most of them pretty ropey. The Damned used Gilbert’s picture in 1977 while Def Leppard produced their own version for Retro Active in 1993. Far better than the metal attempts was Trevor Brown’s sleeve for Coil’s Hellraiser Themes EP which you can see on his blog page along with some other 20th century examples of the motif.

Bryan Talbot’s panel from the first book of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright is less well-known. I’m sure there’s been a lot of this kind of thing in the comics world over the years but Bryan’s version is the only one I have to hand.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm (1991).

And speaking of comics, here’s my own variation in a panel from Reverbstorm #3, drawn in 1991 but not published until 1995.

Hellblazer (unpublished) (1994).

One of the editors at DC Comics liked my Lovecraft and Lord Horror work and asked me to do a tryout for a Hellblazer cover in 1994. I’d only just switched from gouache to painting with acrylics at the time and didn’t feel very confident about using them but also didn’t want to turn the offer down. The painting above was the result and they didn’t like it. I thought I was trying to be clever by doing the skull thing when all they wanted to see was a portrait of John Constantine, not a guy with his face blotted by shadow.

Poison by Dior, photographed by Vincent Peters (2002).

And so to the 21st century and this award-winning ad shot which brings us full circle with a copy of Gilbert’s original picture.

The effect was achieved with skilful lighting, set design and photography rather than post-production trickery, says Peters.

“The image recalls the blending of art and psychology that occurred at the end of the 19th century. I shot it straight, with very little post-production. The trickiest part was getting the composition right – there was only one spot I could take the shot from; an inch to the left or right and the effect would have been spoiled.”

He stresses that the resulting image was “a collaborative effort” and makes special mention of the agency’s creative team. “The agency came to me with the idea and asked me how I would do it. These day it’s rare to be approached for your technical skills. Normally it’s because you can achieve a certain mood. In this case I added the fin de siècle atmosphere.”

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Darwin Day
• Vanitas paintings
• Giant Skeleton and the Chocolate Jesus
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Very Hungry God
• Dalí Atomicus
• History of the skull as symbol

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 produced for the last issue of Arthur Magazine.

Earth play that kind of slowed-to-a-crawl metal which has its roots in Black Sabbath (the origin of their name) and Swans. The band have some great album and track titles, among them Thrones and Dominions, Hex (Or Printing in the Infernal Method) and Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine, the latter being borrowed by a drone doom supergroup. Unlike followers Sunn O))), who don robes and fill the stage with fog, the Earth presentation is a minimal one: no vocals, just the music, and no effects, red light only. I’d heard a couple of Earth CDs but what becomes obvious when you see them live is that this kind of music really benefits from loud volume and a good sound system. Both those elements were in place tonight which made for a thoroughly immersive experience.

Earth have a new album out at the end of this month, The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, on the Southern Lord label.

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 fitting.

The CD is a digipak on textured art paper and another quality production from Horus CyclicDaemon. The exhibition catalogue manifested as a small hardback book which was a pleasant surprise, with the skull maze design blocked in silver on the cover. Each artist is allotted a single page and the book also includes some original fiction based on Lovecraft’s story notes by a number of well-known writers. My picture is rather shrunken the way it’s positioned across the centre of a page (would have been better running vertically) but then it was my decision to make it so wide in the first place.

The Chaoticum CD is limited to 500 copies and can be ordered here. The catalogue is available from Maison D’Ailleurs or the Payot Libraire bookstore for CHF 37.00 + p&p (or 38, depending on which page you look at).

Also arriving this week is my illustration of ex-Sun City Girls guitarist Sir Richard Bishop for an Arthur Magazine interview by Erik Davis. Arthur #27 will be hitting the stands in the US and Canada shortly but for now you can download it in PDF form here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs
• New things for October

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, not least a collection devoted to Witchcraft. This perhaps reflects the wide-ranging interests of the Trust’s founder, Henry Wellcome. Jay Babcock and I visited the exhibition of artefacts from Wellcome’s vast collection at the British Museum in 2003 and that proved to be a similarly surprising cabinet of curiosities, including sheets of tattooed human skin and Charles Darwin’s skull-headed walking stick. I was sure I had a photograph of the latter but don’t seem able to find it if it’s still around. Never mind, the BBC has a picture, together with other items from the exhibition. Also on display there was a specially-commissioned film from the Brothers Quay which can now be seen in their DVD collection.

Via Boing Boing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Calligraphy by Mouneer Al-Shaárani
• The Brothers Quay on DVD
• The Journal of Ottoman Calligraphy
• Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East
• The Atlas Coelestis of Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr

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 of the Romantic or late-Romantic era: Turner, Francis Danby, John Martin, Philippe de Loutherbourg and Joseph Wright’s enormous An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, which is now housed in the National Gallery. The National Gallery site has this to say about the picture:

A travelling scientist is shown demonstrating the formation of a vacuum by withdrawing air from a flask containing a white cockatoo, though common birds like sparrows would normally have been used. Air pumps were developed in the 17th century and were relatively familiar by Wright’s day. The artist’s subject is not scientific invention, but a human drama in a night-time setting.

The bird will die if the demonstrator continues to deprive it of oxygen, and Wright leaves us in doubt as to whether or not the cockatoo will be reprieved. The painting reveals a wide range of individual reactions, from the frightened children, through the reflective philosopher, the excited interest of the youth on the left, to the indifferent young lovers concerned only with each other.

The figures are dramatically lit by a single candle, while in the window the moon appears. On the table in front of the candle is a glass containing a skull.

As with many paintings, the online reproductions do little justice to the subtlety of Wright’s rendering of light and shade. This remains his most famous picture although he made another on a similar theme, A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery (below) and, like Godfried Schalcken, he has at least two studies of people viewing statues by candlelight, a common practice at that time for the way the light gave classical sculpture a spurious life. Wright’s painting of The Alchymist is another popular work, turning up frequently in occult encyclopedias. Being a native of Derby he also became (along with de Loutherbourg) one of the first painters to depict the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution whose flaring furnaces provided an ideal subject for dramatists of flame and shadow.

Before leaving the tenebral world, I’ll note that Claire left a message to say that issue 24 of Cabinet Magazine has a feature on shadows in art, symbolism and philosophy.

The Alchymist, In Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers (1771).

A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery (1766).

Academy by Lamplight (1768-69).

Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight (1765).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Chiaroscuro
• Shadows at Compton Verney
• Death from above
• The apocalyptic art of Francis Danby

The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger (1533).

Vanitas by Franciscus Gysbrechts (no date).

Self-portrait With Vanitas Symbols by Giovanni Baglione (no date).

The Nature as a Symbol of Vanitas by Abraham Mignon (1665-1679).

Vanitas Still Life by Jacques de Gheyn the Elder (1603).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Giant Skeleton and the Chocolate Jesus
• Very Hungry God
• History of the skull as symbol

Mid-Sagital Skull Bisection (2007).
Hand casted acrylic resin with vintage watch parts.

Articulated Singer Insect (2005).
Antique mechanical parts and vintage Singer sewing attachment.

Lots of other great creations at the artist’s site. Via Boing Boing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Pierre Matter’s cyborg sculpture
• Insect Lab
• The art of Jessica Joslin

The giant skeleton by Gino De Dominicis is on display in the Palazzo Reale in Milan. More pictures at the Wooster Collective and also here. Via Towleroad.

Cosimo Cavallaro’s My Sweet Lord is due to go on display at Manhattan’s Lab Gallery in New York City on Monday but complaints from the usual suspects are giving the gallery second thoughts. More on that here. It’s okay to make any number of Messiahs from wood, stone, metal or plastic, just don’t dare make a Jesus out of anything edible.

Update: the Lab Gallery showing of the edible Jesus has been cancelled.

Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League, said the work was a direct assault on Christians. “All those involved are lucky that angry Christians don’t react the way extremist Muslims do when they’re offended.”

Don’t be shy Bill, you know you’re itching to bring back the Inquisition. So Christians are angry are they? Isn’t that one of the Seven Deadly Sins? Another complaint was that Jesus is shown naked, something that we see in plenty of paintings depicting him as a child. Oh well, the artist and gallery owners can feel relieved they weren’t stabbed or shot for their pains and the forces of Righteous Wrath can file into church at the weekend to eat the body of Christ. You know, like they do every Sunday.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Very Hungry God
• Gay for God
• History of the skull as symbol

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

Subodh Gupta’s giant skull constructed from Indian cooking utensils.
From an exhibition at the Eglise Saint-Bernard, Paris, October 2006.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• History of the skull as symbol