March 2010 – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

The Savoy magazine

Further retrievals from the depths of the Internet Archive (and thanks to Lord Cornelius Plum for the tip) come in the form of three bound editions of The Savoy magazine, a British art and literary periodical which ran for eight issues from January to December 1896. Aubrey Beardsley was art editor and chief illustrator, Arthur Symons the literary editor and the publisher was the heroic and duplicitous London pornographer Leonard Smithers whose patronage and, it should be noted, exploitation of Beardsley’s work kept the artist solvent during his last two years.

A thesis could be written (and no doubt has been) exploring the curious symbiosis between pornography publishers and the artistic avant garde. Smithers was a proud purveyor of what he called “smut” but he also complained about all the money he lost supporting poets and down-at-heel writers. Posterity can thank him for publishing Teleny, the classic early work of gay fiction attributed to Oscar Wilde, as well as Beardsley’s Lysistrata illustrations and The Savoy, a magazine founded in the fallout of the Wilde scandal when The Yellow Book dropped Beardsley from its staff in order to appease its more conservative contributors. The magazine’s run was short due to poor sales after WH Smith’s refused to stock it, worried again about the controversial nature of Beardsley’s art. (Speculative fiction magazine New Worlds faced similar problems with Smith’s in the late Sixties.) This seems astonishing to us now when looking at the world-class roster of contributors to the first issue, a list which included two future Nobel winners—George Bernard Shaw and WB Yeats—as well as Max Beerbohm, Ernest Dowson, Havelock Ellis, JM Whistler, Charles Shannon, William Rothenstein, and Beardsley writing and illustrating the first part of his erotic caprice, Under the Hill.

Beardsley’s illustrations are very familiar from book reproduction but it’s good to see them in the context in which they first appeared, and to be able to read some of the features. The later issues include pages of adverts which always fascinate for their contemporary detail.

• The Savoy: Volume 1 | Volume 2 | Volume 3

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Aubrey Beardsley archive
• The illustrators archive

Boy clones

Yes, there’s something attractive about the proposition if the clones in question look like Ben Lamberty’s duplicated models from this fashion shoot. For earlier variations on the theme there’s a series by Toxicboy (although his site now seems to be defunct), and Anthony Goicolea, of course. Via Homotography, as usual.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Anthony Goicolea
• Toxicboy

The art of Jim Leon, 1938–2002

Psychopathia Sexualis (1967).

This, dear friends, is what the art of the fantastic could give us but rarely does, something which combines the metaphysical intensity of the Symbolists with a post-Freudian sensibility to create what Philip José Farmer once called “the pornography of the weird”. Jim Leon was a British artist whose work gained prominence via the underground magazines of the 1960s, especially Oz, although he was never really a psychedelic artist as such. Many of his earliest paintings show the influence of the Pop artists, it was only later in the decade that a distinctly original and surreal imagination came to the fore. Oz was always pretty scurrilous and had no qualms about challenging the authorities with bizarre sexual imagery which other magazines would never dare to print. Leon and other artists were fortunate to have such a public forum for outré work, a few years earlier or later and they might not have found an outlet at all.

Untitled (1979).

His early work blended influences from Francis Bacon, surrealism and the baroque. Lurking there is also the English visionary William Blake, together with the obsessive Romanticism of the pre-Raphaelites. A number of his early paintings and drawings refer to William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (first published in Paris in 1959). These were just some of the ingredients of an amazing, semi-abstract, spatially complex, ritualistic, orgiastic flesh-painting, expressing highly wrought morbidity, eroticism, transcendence and ecstasy; astonishing explorations of the murkier depths of the human mind. (More.)

A Very English Visionary by Simon Wilson.

I first encountered Leon’s work thanks to David Britton’s curating of a portfolio feature in Wordworks magazine which was republished in the Savoy Books anthology, The Savoy Book in 1980. Having seen a Leon painting in a back issue of Oz I was surprised that an artist with such a powerful imagination was so little-known. It turns out that he’d been working all along, albeit far from the public gaze, having moved to Lyons in France where he spent the 1970s and 80s painting many canvases of mystical scenes similar to those produced by the California artists featured in the Visions book. None of his later work explores the darker realms of his earlier Psychopathia Sexualis drawings, and since it’s the early work that I prefer, that’s what’s featured here. These drawings and paintings bear comparison with the art of Raymond Bertrand but where Bertrand has had his work published in lavish book collections, we have to rake through back issues of magazines for Leon’s endeavours. Leon’s later paintings at least have a website which is maintained by his family.

Continue reading “The art of Jim Leon, 1938–2002”

Weekend links 6

Shades of Toho: the city of San Francisco encounters its octopoid nemesis on this gig poster from DKNG. Via OMG Posters!

• Related to the above: Godzilla Haiku.

• View from Another Shore: a fantastic (so to speak) and overdue interview with Franz Rottensteiner, writer and editor of landmark studies of fantasy and science fiction.

• Ronald Searle: a life in pictures: an appreciation by Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell.

• 832 masks: The Maskatorium at Flickr.

• The Cult of the Theremin: lots of theremin links including this page of scans from a beautiful Art Deco theremin brochure. (Thanks to Kara for the tip!) Related: the DIY IKEA lamp theremin.

• Music & Science Fiction, an exhibition at Maison d’Ailleurs.

• Nathalie found a stoned angel in Rome.

• EVB’s Boy of the Week is a Spanish guy in his underwear drawn by Jacobo Labella.

• Film of the month: Sally Potter’s Orlando on DVD, featuring the luminous enigma of Tilda Swinton.

Frans De Geetere’s illustrated Maldoror

Calling this 1927 edition “illustrated” perhaps stretches the point seeing as Frans De Geetere’s illustrations are rather more minimal and restrained than you’d expect for Lautréamont’s proto-Surrealist masterwork. The Koopman Collection’s page for this book lists 65 Geetere’s etchings but only shows a handful. I’d like to see more of these even if the samples here are representative, Les Chants de Maldoror being a book more deserving of illustration than most.

Frans De Geetere (1895–1968) was Belgian and there’s a Symbolist lineage in this work with his naming Fernand Khnopff and other Belgian Symbolists as influences. He was also a friend of the wealthy arts patron Harry Crosby whose note about the artist promises more than the artwork here delivers:

The darkness of the forest where he was born, the sombre curriculum of the monks together with the rich darkness of ecclesiastical music, the spark of revolt kindled at the Academy of Brussels and whipped into a flame of hatred by the frescoes his father compelled him to paint in the neighboring churches, his first escape (if artists can be said to escape), the year of hunger whitewashing the walls of houses (le soleil contre le mur blanc) and, at nineteen, night duty as guardian in a maison de fous, these were, for M. Frans de Geetere, the foundation stones of that strange building men call the soul. In the madhouse he worked at his painting by day, and by night snatched unsettled hours of sleep, and in this environment developed those queer, abnormal faces that stare out at us from the pages of Maldoror. …And if “Lautreamont has liberated the imagination and dispelled our fear to enter into darkness” as Mr. Jolas so significantly remarked, M. de Geetere with a smoldering rage and fearlessness of creation followed the poet into darkness–“into the occult beyond” to quote Mr. Jolas again, “where new and demonic visions” (I am reminded of Beardsley and Redon and Alastair) “people our solitude.”

Elsewhere on {feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on {feuilleton }
• The art of Sibylle Ruppert
• Maldoror illustrated