Thomas Beg’s Dorian Gray

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Oscar Wilde’s story in this adaptation is shortened to a very brisk eight minutes which utilises 3D animation and makes some smart use of period photos. The film was an animation project by UCA Rochester student Thomas Beg who also has a brief rendering of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights here.

The collage approach for Dorian Gray caught my attention since it’s not far removed from the collage style I used when adapting the story myself for the forthcoming second edition of The Graphic Canon. My version was in part a formal challenge which tried to use materials from Wilde’s time that also relate in some way to Wilde himself. More about that later. Thomas Beg’s version owes something to Albert Lewin’s 1945 film adaptation, especially in its views of the portrait, but it’s distinctive enough to stand alone. Watch it here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Oscar Wilde archive

Books of blood

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Artist Nick Kushner writes to alert me that his 2010 painting Maldoror: Satan Seated Upon His Throne has been used on the cover of a recent Russian edition of Lautréamont’s novel. Kushner uses his own blood to create his paintings, and the cover below has been created using the same material. Maldoror himself would no doubt demand that proper homage be paid by binding the volume in human skin. That’s something publisher Provocateurs’ Club can maybe try for the special edition.

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This news has reminded me that I had a mail last month from another American artist, Robert Sherer, concerning a book collection of his own blood paintings. Sherer also uses the blood of friends both HIV-negative and HIV-positive. Blood Works: The Sanguineous Art of Robert Sherer is published by Kennesaw State University Press.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Magritte’s Maldoror
Frans De Geetere’s illustrated Maldoror
The art of Robert Sherer
Maldoror illustrated

The Garden of Adompha

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…the growths of that garden were such as no terrestrial sun could have fostered, and Dwerulas said that their seed was of like origin with the globe. There were pale, bifurcated trunks that strained upwards as if to disroot themselves from the ground, unfolding immense leaves like the dark and ribbed wings of dragons. There were amaranthine blossoms, broad as salvers, supported by arm-thick stems that trembled continually.

And there were many other weird plants, diverse as the seven hells, and having no common characteristics other than the scions which Dwerulas had grafted upon them here and there through his unnatural and necromantic art.

These scions were the various parts and members of human beings. Consummately, and with never failing success, the magician had joined them to the half-vegetable, half-animate stocks on which they lived and grew thereafter, drawing an ichor-like sap. Thus were preserved the carefully chosen souvenirs of a multitude of persons who had inspired Dwerulas and the king with distaste or ennui. On palmy boles, beneath feathery-tufted foliage, the heads of eunuchs hung in bunches, like enormous black drupes. A bare, leafless creeper was flowered with the ears of delinquent guardsmen. Misshapen cacti were fruited with the breasts of women, or foliated with their hair. Entire limbs or torsos had been united with monstrous trees. Some of the huge salver-like blossoms bore palpitating hearts, and certain smaller blooms were centered with eyes that still opened and closed amid their lashes. And there were other graftings, too obscene or repellent for narration.

Thus Clark Ashton Smith in The Garden of Adompha, one of the stories in the author’s Zothique cycle which was first published in Weird Tales in April, 1938. Zothique was Smith’s contribution to the Dying Earth subgenre, sixteen stories set on the last continent in the final days of the Earth, and a home to no end of sorcery and cruelty. I’ve always enjoyed this subgenre, especially in the hands of Jack Vance whose later Dying Earth stories show the influence of Zothique, so these are some of my favourites among Smith’s prodigious output. The Garden of Adompha is a particularly grotesque piece, concerning the sequestered garden of the title to which King Adompha has undesirables removed. Once there his wizard, Dwerulas, drugs the victims and grafts parts of their bodies to the garden’s hothouse plants. Virgil Finlay’s cover painting downplays the horror somewhat, and Dwerulas’s supine prey, Thuloneah, looks like a very typical American girl, but then for a story that reads like a pulp equivalent of Octave Mirbeau it’s surprising it made the cover at all.

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Re-reading some of Smith’s stories over the past week, The Garden of Adompha among them, there’s been the additional pleasure of searching for illustrations from their original publication. I knew that Virgil Finlay had painted this cover, one of the few cover features Smith received from Weird Tales, but Alistair Durie’s Weird Tales (1979) collection only has a monochrome reproduction. The always reliable Golden Age Comic Book Stories not only has a copy of Finlay’s original painting but also the interior illustration which looks like a litho drawing rather than the artist’s more usual scratchboard. The most recent book collection featuring the story was The Collected Fantasies Of Clark Ashton Smith Volume 5: The Last Hieroglyph (2010) from Night Shade Books. (I would have linked to the publisher’s page but their site seems to be broken.)

Update: Golden Age Comic Book Stories changed its name then vanished altogether. The picture links here have been updated.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
Vathek illustrated
The Vengeance of Nitocris
The House of Orchids by George Sterling
Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers
Odes and Sonnets by Clark Ashton Smith
The King in Yellow
Clark Ashton Smith book covers

The Story of Rustem and Other Persian Hero Tales

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This edition of Elizabeth D. Renninger’s retelling of Persian folk tales dates from 1909, the tales in question being adapted for children from the epic poetry of Hakim Abu’l-Qasim Ferdowsi Tusi, aka Ferdowsi or Firdusi as he’s credited here. Names translated from Persian or Arabic often vary from one book to the next, and that’s the case in this volume with the heroic figure of Rostam (or Rustam) being rendered as Rustem. Likewise in the story of albino warrior Zal, the great bird he encounters, here named the Simurgh, can also be found written as Simorgh, Simurg or Simoorg which often makes searching for information about these stories (or their illustrators) difficult.

The illustrations are by JLS Williams, and it’s a shame there aren’t more of them since I like the bold style and heavy blacks. Williams is listed mostly for his magazine illustration so I can’t say whether he did any other book work. The Story of Rustem may be read online here or downloaded here. Rustem doesn’t meet the Simurgh in this collection but he did in this splendid drawing by Patten Wilson.

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Continue reading “The Story of Rustem and Other Persian Hero Tales”

Rue St. Augustin, then and now

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Boutique art nouveau, 45 rue st. Augustin (2e arr, 1904–05).

Despite being reasonably familiar with Eugène Atget’s celebrated photos of Paris, this picture of a very elaborate Art Nouveau façade is something I’d not seen until now. The photo is part of the George Eastman House collection of Atget prints, and is unusual for showing a very contemporary shopfront. Atget generally preferred premises redolent of an older, pre-Haussmann Paris, like the window full of barometers at Au Griffon, 39 Quai de l’Horloge. The Rue St. Augustin façade is an especially baroque example of Art Nouveau excess with a flying fish, a large butterfly (or moth) supporting the window, and the ubiquitous fin de siècle female floating above it. Naturally I had to know if the decor had survived but a quick look at Google Maps revealed the mundane scene below. The apartment entrance next door is pretty much unchanged but the wine shop that’s there now shows no traces of its delirious past.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
Hector Guimard elevations
Infernal entrances
Hector Guimard sketches
Temples for Future Religions by François Garas
Elizabetes Iela 10b, Riga
Atelier Elvira
Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
The Maison Lavirotte
The House with Chimaeras