Thames & Hudson – Page 3

Passage 10

My good friend Ed Jansen writes to inform me that a new edition of his web (and occasionally, print) magazine Passage has appeared. Contents can be seen above: musician Steven Brown, a member of the excellent Tuxedomoon with a separate solo career; artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare who’s been featured here several times; mythical hero Odysseus and playwright, poet and actor, Antonin Artaud. Since Ed is Dutch, the contents are also largely in Dutch but at { feuilleton } we try to be at least occasionally international. The Steven Brown section includes some English language material and the magazine is worth a look for the pictures, especially the Spare work which includes a number of examples I haven’t seen before. Once again I can’t help think that Spare is long overdue a serious monograph from the likes of Thames & Hudson.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Austin Spare’s Behind the Veil
• Another playlist for Halloween
• Austin Osman Spare

San Francisco angels

Miller Blues Band/Mother Earth/Bukka White by Alton Kelley & Stanley Mouse (1967).

I already had this piece roughed out before discovering that psychedelic artist Alton Kelley died last month, something that doesn’t seem to have been reported very widely. I posted the picture above last October then in January this year wrote something about San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. But it’s taken me until now to realise that these two things are connected.

The San Francsico poster artists of the Sixties, of which Mouse & Kelley were leading members, borrowed frequently from earlier sources, especially Art Nouveau stylists such as Alphonse Mucha and the Symbolist painters. A recent Thames & Hudson book, Off the Wall: Psychedelic Rock Posters from San Francisco traces some of the more obvious influences but this is one example which seems to have eluded them.

Descending Night and Rising Day by Adolph Alexander Weinman (1914).

The statue that Mouse & Kelley used was titled Descending Night and was, with Rising Day (aka The Rising Sun), one of a pair of symbolic works created by sculptor Adolph Alexander Weinman (1870–1952) for the Panama-Pacific Exposition. The photos above are from one of the books I linked to earlier, Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts by Juliet Helena Lumbard James. The identities of artists’ models are rarely preserved but in the case of Descending Night we know that one Audrey Munson was the model. And I know that thanks to a well-timed overview of Ms Munson’s career by Silent-Porn-Star.

Weinman later worked his statue designs into these rather fine figurines which became his best-selling small bronzes. These pictures make visible the stars at the feet of Night and the sun at the feet of Day.

left: Adolph Alexander Weinman in his studio with a study for Descending Night in the background; right: Alton Kelley in the Sixties.

Weinman didn’t live long enough to see his work exploited on a gaudy concert poster and given his adherence to a pre-Modern, Beaux-Arts style it’s perhaps just as well. He’s most remembered today for his Liberty design for the American Silver Eagle which also used Audrey Munson as the model. Ms Munson lived to 1996 so I can’t help wonder if she ever saw her youthful figure return on Mouse and Kelley’s poster. The same year as the San Francisco Exposition she played an artist’s model in Inspiration, a film by George Foster Platt which is only notable now for being the first American non-porn film to feature a nude woman. She stripped off again a year later for Rae Berger’s Purity. Audrey was 76 in 1967 but something tells me she that her free spirit would have identified with the Summer of Love more than many others of her generation.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Evanescent City
• Family Dog postcards

Jessie M King’s Grey City of the North

“This dark and steep alley took its name from Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees, Lord Advocate of Scotland, 1692–1713, whose mansion stood at the foot of the close. It was a fashionable quarter in the early 18th century, and here resided Andrew Crosby, the famous lawyer, the original of Scott’s ‘Andrew Pleydell,’ Lord Westhall, John Scougall, the painter of George Heriot, and many well-known people of the time.”

Another book scan from the Internet Archive, this time a title which plays to my fetish for Old Edinburgh. The illustration work of Jessie M King (1875–1949) was featured here in September with a delicate piece from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde. The Grey City of the North (1910) is quite a departure from her usual style, being a collection of monochrome views of buildings, streets and closes of the Old Town. Very nice lettering on all the plates which perhaps shows some influence from her colleague Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Advocates’ Close has particular significance for me since I copied a view of the alley for my adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark in 1986. Providence looks nothing at all like Edinburgh, of course, but I couldn’t find adequate reference at the time so used photographs of Scotland by Edwin Smith instead. You can see Smith’s photograph and my rendering of it below. Among the Internet Archive’s other Jessie King books there’s a follow-up to the Edinburgh volume, The City of the West; 24 drawings in photogravure of Old Glasgow.

Another view of the close from Edinburgh and The Lothians by Francis Watt; illustration by Walter Dexter (1912).

Advocates’ Close by Edwin Smith from Scotland (1955).

This book of photographs was an early Thames & Hudson title using their typically excellent photogravure reproduction. My copy was rescued from a waste bin near Manchester University and I’ve used it so much for reference over the years I’ve often wondered what I would have done without that chance encounter. You can see from my copy below (drawn with a 0.2mm Variant pen) how much detail I skimped and how much I embellished. I skimped rather more than I remember, as it happens. I think if I’d have drawn this a couple of years later I might have been more faithful to the original.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ephemeral architecture
• The Essex Street Water Gate

Ephemeral architecture

The Royal Arch, Dundee, photographed by Edwin Smith.

It’s an odd thing to discover that a structure you’ve known about for years has been demolished for almost as long as you’ve been alive. It took a review of Britain’s Lost Cities by Gavin Stamp to inform me that the curious Royal Arch in Dundee, Scotland, built between 1849 and 1853, was no more. I only knew it from this photograph in an old Thames & Hudson book, Scotland (1955) by Edwin Smith and GS Fraser.

Even though the arch had an official function—providing a ceremonial gateway for Queen Victoria—in its free-standing singularity and historical confection it’s not very far removed from the numerous follies that still litter the British countryside. Being a long-time fan of the pointless architectural confection, I like to know that these things are still around even if they’re not so good to look at; they make the world a more interesting place.

The architect of this pastiche, which looks like a chunk of Norman cathedral dumped on the dockside, was one John Thomas Rochead whose oddly-shaped and frequently spectacular Wallace Monument still stands. I think it’s the incongruity I like about the arch, its setting and style are completely at odds and it has the fake ruin aspect of many follies, looking like a fragment of something larger. Monuments are often a sub-class of folly and Scotland has another fine example with the Scott Monument in Edinburgh.

Rochead’s arch was demolished in 1964 to make way for the Tay Road Bridge, another victim of the Sixties’ purge of Victorian eccentricity. I don’t always disagree with those purges, the Victorians had no qualms about demolishing older buildings and some of the structures whose demolition Gavin Stamp complains about were pretty awful. Euston Station in London is a soulless glass barn but I can’t see how its exterior would be improved if the heavy and dull Euston Arch had been allowed to remain as its gateway. What we’re seeing today is a reaction to that reaction, with the concrete buildings that were raised on the rubble of their Victorian forebears suffering their own waves of demolition. What goes around, comes around, and even the most apparently permanent structure can be swept away when attitudes change.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lenin Rising
• Dead Monuments
• The Triangular Lodge
• Pyramid mausoleum

The South Bank Show: Francis Bacon

Non-Brits may not be aware that The South Bank Show is a long-running arts programme (or “show”, as Americans prefer) and the last bastion of cultural broadcasting on the otherwise completely moribund ITV channel. Over the years the SBS has produced some great documentaries and this one from 1985 is particularly good, capturing artist Francis Bacon in fine form, both as combative critic and sozzled pisshead when he and presenter Melvyn Bragg drink too much wine in a restaurant. Highlights include his funny dismissal of Mark Rothko whilst viewing paintings at the Tate, their tour of his cramped studio, and his drunken pronunciation of the word “voluptuous” when describing Michelangelo’s male figures.

I taped this programme when it was repeated after Bacon’s death in 1992 but you lucky people can now see and download it from Ubuweb. (Their note says the SBS is a BBC production but this is incorrect.)

Part of The South Bank Show series, David Hinton directs this documentary about British painter Francis Bacon, known for his horrifying portraits of humanity. The program consists of a series of conversations between Bacon and interviewer Melvyn Bragg, starting with commentary during a side-show presentation at the Tate Gallery in London. Later in the evening, Bacon is followed through various bars hanging out, drinking, and gambling. In another segment, Bacon provides a tour of his painting studio and a glimpse at his reference photographs of distorted humans. The artist discusses his theories, influences, and obsessions. This title won an International Emmy Award in 1985.

This isn’t necessarily the best Bacon interview, that accolade would probably have to go to the 1984 Arena documentary (which was a BBC production) Francis Bacon: The Brutality of Fact where FB is interviewed by art critic and long-time supporter David Sylvester. Sylvester interviewed Bacon many times over twenty years or so and Thames & Hudson printed the Arena interview along with several of their other talks in Sylvester’s book of the same name. Essential reading for anyone interested in the artist’s work.

Bacon’s work has affected my own on a number of occasions. The cover to Reverbstorm #4 borrowed the carcass from his Painting (1946); some of the paintings I was doing in 1997 (like this one and this one) are distinctly Bacon-esque and we used two of his paintings on the cover design for Savoy’s edition of The Killer (Dave Britton’s idea on that occasion).

His work remains popular for the over-inflated art market. Sketches and unfinished paintings that he was throwing out, and detritus like discarded cheque books, sold for nearly a million pounds last month. And earlier this week his Study from Innocent X (1960) went for $52.6m in a New York auction. Bacon once said that “some artists leave remarkable things which, a hundred years later, don’t work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar—you never know.” I think we can assume this won’t be happening for a while yet.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• T&H: At the Sign of the Dolphin
• 20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips