{ feuilleton }

Another book design of mine (interiors only) which I completed last September for Tachyon and about which I had this to say at the time: Kafkaesque [is] edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly. It’s a collection of short stories either inspired by Franz Kafka, or with a Kafka-like atmosphere, and features a high [...]

While chasing down Virgil Finlay’s illustration for Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space earlier this week I came across another Finlay drawing I’d not noticed before in a book I’ve owned for years. Makes me wonder what else is lurking on the shelves. Finlay’s depiction of Salomé was an illustration for Waxworks, a story by [...]

Kafka (1991). This week I completed the interior design for a new anthology from Tachyon, Kafkaesque, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly. It’s a collection of short stories either inspired by Franz Kafka, or with a Kafka-like atmosphere, and features a high calibre of contributions from writers including JG Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, [...]

Wilhelm Volz (1855–1901) was a German artist whose work I might not have paid any attention to at all had this lithograph not been featured in that cult volume Dreamers of Decadence. As a composition it’s a lot more interesting than Volz’s paintings, the circle for a halo being an unusual detail. There’s also more [...]

Tilda Swinton in The Last of England (1988). John Dee turned up in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee after scenes from an earlier script about the Elizabethan magus were grafted onto the punk dystopia. Jarman’s career was to be littered with these unrealised projects, the strangest of which was Neutron, an apocalyptic science fiction film he was [...]

And still they come… Valenti Angelo (1897–1982) was an American printmaker, author of several books for children and the illustrator of an estimated 250 classic works of fiction including this 1945 edition of Wilde’s Salomé for Heritage Press. Angelo has an engagingly simple style in this and other works, reminding me of David Sheridan’s Tarot [...]

Queen Salomé (1937) by Salvador Dalí. Of all the Surrealists, Salvador Dalí had his fingers in the most cultural pies—designing for film and theatre, writing books (including a novel, Hidden Faces), even performing occasionally, or at least making a public spectacle of himself—so it’s no surprise to find him adding to the stock of 20th-century [...]

So there’s a poster for Al Pacino’s forthcoming drama-documentary about the Oscar Wilde play but I’ve yet to see any release details. The tagline connects Salomé with The Ballad of Reading Gaol: “We kill the thing we love.” Searching around for posters turned up this item for an Italian-French co-production of the Wilde play directed [...]

Seduction. One of a series of paintings by a British artist, and what a great series it is with echoes of ancient art as well as Gustav Klimt. Also further evidence that this theme isn’t a wholly masculine preoccupation. Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The Salomé archive

Salomé (1901). Monsieur Wiley prompted this post by drawing my attention to the picture above. I’d already seen another Salomé by Gustav Adolf Mossa on this page a few days ago but resisted the temptation to mention it. A bit more searching revealed yet another Mossa rendering of the theme which perhaps isn’t so surprising [...]

Salomé: Der Wunsch. Back in March I wrote something about Alex Koch’s art periodical, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, a guide to German arts, crafts and architecture founded in Darmstadt in 1897. The Internet Archive has a nearly complete run of these and I’ve recently been working my way through their scans, a process which takes [...]

The Dance of Salomé (1885) by Robert Fowler. There’s always more to find… Unfortunately, Robert Fowler’s academic tableaux is a prime example of bad Victorian art: carefully modelled but overlit, dull and lifeless. And worst of all for the subject at hand: deeply unerotic. We’re supposed to believe that this woman wrapped in a bedsheet [...]

Salomé (1909). I thought this current thread was finished yesterday but it seems not. Julius Klinger (1876–1942) was an Austrian artist and designer whose early work can be found in the first numbers of Jugend magazine. Subsequent work includes a number of erotic illustrations such as top-heavy Salomé here, a depiction which startles when you [...]

Yet another Salomé, this 1927 edition being a beautifully stylised Art Deco version by John Vassos (1898–1985), a Greek artist who moved to America in the 1920s. There aren’t many examples of these drawings online, unfortunately, I love to see a complete set of the illustrations. Salomé’s underarm hair is a detail one can’t imagine [...]

An illustration by René Bull (1872–1942) from The Russian Ballet (1913) by AE Johnson. Bull seems to be primarily known as one of the many illustrators of that Golden Age staple, The Arabian Nights, although his interpretation is a little too comical for my taste. You can judge for yourself here. Other Salomés turning up [...]

A new production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé is touring the UK this month, a presentation of the Headlong company which will appear in a number of venues throughout the country but not in Manchester, unfortunately. My disappointment at this news prompted me by way of compensation to finally order a DVD of the Steven Berkoff [...]

More Wildeana. It’s taken me over two decades to watch this film and while I can’t really say it was worth the wait it was more entertaining than I expected. Salome’s Last Dance was directed in 1988 by Ken Russell and is his own typically mannered adaptation of the Wilde play. It appeared around the [...]

Another one bites the dust… What are the odds against two of the last surviving big names of cinema expiring in the same week? I could never get fully behind Antonioni the way I could with Bergman, I didn’t think much of the Neo-Realist school that Antonioni began as a part of and his later [...]

Welles: Among those whom I would call “younger generation” Kubrick appears to me to be a giant. Interviewer: But, for example, The Killing was more or less a copy of The Ashphalt Jungle? Welles: Yes, but The Killing was better. The problem of imitation leaves me indifferent, above all if the imitator succeeds in surpassing [...]