August 2010 – Page 6 – { feuilleton }

The art of Anton Pieck, 1895–1987

The drawings of Dutch artist and illustrator Anton Pieck are very good for their finely-rendered architectural detail when they’re not being too comic or whimsical. Flickr has a few sets of the artist’s work which is useful since his museum site is rather lacking. The bookselling picture above comes from this set of watercolours while the black-and-white piece is from an edition of Grimm’s fairy tales published in 1930. There’s also a page of smaller drawings here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Vintage swordplay #5

In honour of the overturning of Prop 8 in California—and because I haven’t posted one of these for a while—another piece of beefy weapon-handling. No idea who this fellow is but he can be seen a lot bigger (if not actually tumescent) at the Haunted Lamp, a place of assorted delights that you really ought to go and browse.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with swords archive

Monsters in art

Frontispiece for Goethe’s Faust (c. 1843) by Eugène Delacroix.

Or a couple of pages from Les monstres dans l’art; êtres humains et animaux bas-reliefs, rinceaux, fleurons, etc., a study of aesthetic teratogenesis by Edmond Valton from 1905. The Delacroix frontispiece gives a better view than the one at the Davison Art Center but they have more of the Faust lithographs. Emmanuel Frémiet’s animals were created to adorn the restored medieval Château de Pierrefonds for Napoleon III. The artist had smaller ceramic copies of the statues made later, of which the lizard is an improvement on the stone version.

Fantastic animals (c. 1870) by Emmanuel Frémiet.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The House with Chimaeras
• Frémiet’s Lizard

Liceti’s monsters

Illustrations from De monstrorum natura, caussis, et differentiis libri duo (On the nature, causes and differences of monsters, 1616) by Italian scientist Fortunio Liceti who we’re told has a crater on the Moon named after him. Further images from Liceti and his contemporaries can be found at Les Monstres de la Renaissance à l’âge classique, an online exhibition of assorted teratisms, prodigies and abominations. Via Monsieur Peacay, no monster he.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Dalí’s Elephant

Madhav Reading Stories of Devi (2007) by Sakti Burman.

Dalí’s Elephant is a group exhibition at London’s Aicon Gallery that “traces the echoes of Surrealism in modern and contemporary art from the Indian Subcontinent.” The exhibition title refers to the gift ashtray which Salvador Dalí designed for Air India in 1967:

In 1967 Air India commissioned Salvador Dali to produce a limited edition ashtray which was to be given to a select group of lucky first-class passengers. Dali produced a small unglazed porcelain ashtray composed of a shell-shaped centre with a serpent around its perimeter. This was supported by three stands, two of which point in the same direction and resemble an elephant’s head. The third stand was inverted so that it resembled swan’s head. Dali was initially paid no more than a few hundred dollars for his design but when they received the design the airline bosses were so delighted that they made Dali the surprise gift of an elephant. Dali lived with the elephant for a few days at his Portligat home before donating the beast to the local zoo. (More.)

The Surrealist element is very much a trace in some of the works which seems surprising given the distinctive heritage of India’s religious imagery, as was demonstrated recently at A Journey Round My Skull. But I like the Sakti Burman paintings, especially the example shown here. Dalí’s Elephant runs to September 4th, 2010.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Marsi Paribatra: the Royal Surrealist
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Bollywood posters
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
• Dalí and Film
• The persistence of DNA
• Salvador Dalí’s apocalyptic happening
• Dalí Atomicus
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie