February 2008 – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Yayoi Kusama

Infinity Mirrored Room—Love Forever (1994).

“It is not controversial to describe Yayoi Kusama as Japan’s greatest living artist,” says Hannah Duguid in The Independent. I made a post about Kusama’s artworks in 2006 and now her work is in exhibition at the Victoria Miro gallery, London.

For this exhibition, revered Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has conceived a new installation Dots Obsession—Infinity Mirrored Room (2008) especially for the upper gallery and in the lower galleries will install 50 new silkscreen works that will be shown alongside two significant sculptural pieces from the early nineties. At Victoria Miro 14 the artist will present a series of new dot paintings and an environmental installation I’m Here, but Nothing (2000-2008). The exhibition will continue outside the gallery where Kusama will install one of her most infamous works, Narcissus Garden in Regents Canal—a work which has never before been exhibited in the UK.

More pictures here. The exhibition runs until 20 March, 2008

Narcissus Garden (1966—2008).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Maximum Silence by Giancarlo Neri
• The art of Yayoi Kusama
• Atomix by Nike Savvas

At the Mountains of Madness

Going through stacks of old artwork today turned up a photocopy of a drawing I did in 1990, my sole attempt to illustrate HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. By the time I did this I was pretty exhausted by Lovecraft’s world and was already at work on the first phase of the Lord Horror comics for Savoy which explains why this is a bit half-hearted, the architecture owing more to Piranesi than anything particularly alien. I forget why I did this now, I think it was at someone’s request, and I’ve also no idea where the original drawing is. The sprawling organic cityscape/landscape I created last year for the Maison d’Ailleurs exhibition is probably closer to the kind of thing this story requires.

At the Mountains of Madness was rejected by Lovecraft’s usual publisher, Weird Tales, for not being enough of a horror story. This is true, the novella is more of a fictional travelogue, especially in its later half where a million-year-old alien city is discovered in the heart of Antarctica. Science fiction magazine Astounding took it instead where it made the cover of the February 1936 issue, the climactic shoggoth attack being painted by Howard V Brown. Poor old Lovecraft had nearly all his most famous stories published in Weird Tales, and helped give the magazine its lasting reputation, yet he was never given a cover feature during his lifetime. Astounding gave him the honour again in June of the same year for another novella, The Shadow Out of Time, also illustrated by Howard Brown.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs

Light in the west

Light in the west
| The return of Portishead.

Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian

Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni (c. 1616).

The Agony and the Ecstasy is an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, based around Guido Reni’s paintings of the martyr, six of which are on display.

This will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to compare directly the six masterpieces which are coming from all over the world to join the St Sebastian owned by Dulwich Picture Gallery. The paintings are coming from New Zealand, South America, Madrid, Genoa and Rome.

The claim for masterpieces is stretching the truth when art experts apparently believe that only two of the martyr paintings credited to Reni are original—the Genoa picture above and the Dulwich’s own version—the rest being later copies. The Genoa version became a favourite of Oscar Wilde and it was a Sebastian by Guido Reni that also excited the illicit passion of the 12 year-old protagonist in Yukio Mishima’s novel Confessions of a Mask. Wilde used the name Sebastian when he went into exile in Paris but he never took his identification with the saint as far as Mishima who adopted the typical pose in the famous photo taken shortly before the writer’s suicide. Wilde had no need of borrowed martyrdoms, his own was more than enough.

Yukio Mishima (1970).

The Agony and the Ecstasy runs until 11 May 2008. For further images of Saint Sebastian, this site is as comprehensive as it gets.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dorian Gray revisited
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• The art of Takato Yamamoto
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• Fred Holland Day
• The Poet and the Pope
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II

Arthur #28

It’s always a red letter day when a new issue of Arthur Magazine appears and this one is especially good, featuring a substantial history of the creation and influence of pulp villain Fantômas (for which I helped source some photos) and an interview with extraordinary singer and musician Diamanda Galás. Lots more besides and as always it’s FREE in the US & Canada. If your local record store or coffee house isn’t carrying it (or you’re outside North America) you can subscribe or download the PDFs.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Another playlist for Halloween
• Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
• Fantômas
• A playlist for Halloween