March 2013 – Page 6 – { feuilleton }

MMM

Post number three thousand, and searching the memory for anything which might be filed under MMM led to more occult art. Moina MacGregor Mathers (1865–1928) was the wife of Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the 1880s. Moina was the sister of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and later took to signing her illustration work “M. Bergson MacGregor”. The illustration above, however, a frontispiece for her husband’s translation of The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage (1897) was signed “M.M.M.” (The signature has been removed in this reproduction but is visible here.) That triplet of initials is typical of western occultism; when Aleister Crowley (no friend of the Mathers) was appointed head of the O.T.O. in Britain his new lodge was named Mysteria Mystica Maxima, or M.M.M.

Ms Mathers wasn’t the greatest of artists but her few works have a fin de siècle charm, and are informed by occult study which she and her husband took seriously. The example below is from yet another slim volume of mystical poetry, Poems (1897) by Golden Dawn adept Charles Rosher. No need to wonder why Max Beerbohm made Enoch Soames a poet; it often seems that those who weren’t writing poetry in the 1890s were in the minority.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Whirlpools
• The Sapphire Museum of Magic and Occultism

Whirlpools

This was a surprise. My first thought on seeing the cover for Ethel Archer’s “book of verse”, The Whirlpool, was that its swirling waters were borrowed from Harry Clarke’s typically astonishing illustration for A Descent into the Maelström by Edgar Allan Poe. The problem there is that the Ethel Archer book was published in 1911 while Clarke’s first collection of Poe illustrations didn’t appear until 1919. The cover for the Archer book was by Ethel’s husband, Eugene Wieland, the publisher of Aleister Crowley’s Equinox periodical/occult treatise, and also the publisher of this volume. Crowley provided an introduction to the book. Given these occult associations it’s possible that Harry Clarke might have seen a copy of this. Clarke’s work appeared in Austin Spare’s own occult periodical, The Golden Hind, and he wasn’t averse to producing occult art of his own. This isn’t to say that Clarke necessarily took anything from the Archer book—sometimes a whirlpool is just a whirlpool—but it’s not outside the bounds of possibility.

There’s a copy of Ethel Archer’s book currently on sale at eBay, together with some original drawings by Eugene Wieland. The cover above came via John Eggeling’s Flickr page of rare book covers. The Poe illustration is via 50 Watts.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Sapphire Museum of Magic and Occultism

Out of season

Photographer Andrew G Fisher sent a link to his web galleries recently, among which there’s a great series of shots from various seaside towns. If I respond to these more than the others it’s because I grew up by the sea. Views like this are an indelible feature of my childhood memories, they often recur in dreams. The peculiar melancholy of an out-of-season holiday resort isn’t exactly an unknown quantity, but if you’ve grown up in one of these places it becomes an ingrained feature of your life. Resort towns have no industry other than catering to holidaymakers; for half the year they lie fallow and appear semi-deserted when their population has been so drastically reduced. Add to this the disparity between the sunny days for which all the facilities cater, and the winter when many of those facilities have been closed down and the weather brings gales howling off the sea, and you have a curious parallel existence which the inhabitants of other towns and cities never experience.

Andrew Fisher’s photographs capture some of this parallel life: the abandoned shelter under a grey sky, empty promenades with iron bollards corroded by the salt air, a line of unused seats made even more cheerless by the presence of a floral tribute. That last shot fixes the nature of the seaside resort as an absolute boundary; the built environment can extend no further than this. Yes, I miss the sea.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Old lighthouses

Weekend links 149

It’s not cheap but it’s rather tasty: The Changing Faces of Bowie, a limited print at the V&A shop produced for the forthcoming David Bowie exhibition. One hundred artists and designers were asked to choose or create a Bowie-related type design, the collection being printed on holographic paper. Creative Review looked at some details. Related: Bowie’s new album, The Next Day, is now streaming in full at iTunes.

• Marisa Siegel reviews The Moon & Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph Cornell by Kristina Marie Darling, “a fully enchanting if somewhat mysterious collection of poems, written entirely as footnotes”. BlazeVOX has an extract here.

• “[Clement] Greenberg came round to our house in Camden Square. He started telling Bill what he should do to improve a work. Dad lost patience and kicked him out.” Alex Turbull of 23 Skidoo on sculptor father William Turnbull.

“You get the impression that a lot of these young directors have never gained much experience of life outside their film schools or their video-rental stores.”

Anne Billson met Roman Polanski in 1995 to discuss Death and the Maiden.

• Max Beerbohm’s The Happy Hypocrite, and Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory are available in new print-on-demand and ebook editions from Michael Walmer.

• “Bring Back the Illustrated Book!” says Sam Sacks. Some of us would reply that it never went away but merely remains subject to much unexamined prejudice.

• The Forest and The Trees: A blog by Genevieve Kaplan about altered texts and book art by herself and other artists.

• The Homosexual Atom Bomb: Sophie Pinkham on gay rights, Soviet Russia and the Cold War.

• Who’s Afraid Of The Art Of Zang Tumb Tuum? A blog devoted to the ZTT record label.

• Nigel Kneale’s TV ghost drama, The Stone Tape, is reissued on DVD later this month.

• The drawings of Victor Hugo.

• David Bowie at Pinterest.

• The Man Who Sold The World (1994) by Nirvana | V-2 Schneider (1996) by Philip Glass | ‘Heroes’ (2000) by King Crimson

Paul Delvaux: The Sleepwalker of Saint-Idesbald

Saint-Idesbald is a small, unremarkable seaside town on the Belgian coast situated between Ostend and the border with France. I spent a week there on a school camping holiday in the 1970s unaware that it was the home of the great Surrealist painter Paul Delvaux (1897–1994). I suppose you could make the argument that the location of Dalí’s home in Cadaqués was equally unremarkable, but Dalí’s house was well-known, and that area of the Spanish coast is familiar from many of his paintings. The surprise in later discovering that Delvaux lived in Saint-Idesbald, rather than Brussels or Bruges, or even Ostend, is that the town is quite unlike the tram-haunted, cobblestoned, moonlit vistas of his paintings. It’s appropriate that JG Ballard thought highly enough of Delvaux to mention his paintings in some of his stories, and also commission reproductions of two lost canvases; Ballard’s Shepperton was an equally unlikely home for such a vivid imagination.

Paul Delvaux: The Sleepwalker of Saint-Idesbald is a film from the Naxos record label that lasts all of three minutes, but which happens to feature the first footage I’ve seen of Paul Delvaux as a working artist. Despite Ballard’s attention, Delvaux has often been passed over as a subject of Surrealist documentaries in favour of the usual trinity of Dalí, Magritte and Max Ernst. There are older documentaries in existence, however, so I’ll continue to hope they may turn up eventually. For anyone who happens to journey near Saint-Idesbald, many of Delvaux’s paintings can be seen in the museum there.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Public Voice by Lejf Marcussen
• Ballard and the painters
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux