June 2013 – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Nocturnes

KOBAYASHI, Eijiro–”A High Bridge by Night”

The Night Scenes is a series of 21 woodcut prints by Japanese artists published by Hasegawa/Nishinomiya in the early 1900s. Gorgeous work, and apparently popular enough for the prints to have been reissued many times since. These examples are from a print-selling site with several extensive galleries of 20th-century Japanese prints.

The High Bridge at Night struck me for being remarkably similar to Whistler’s famous painting of Old Battersea Bridge, Nocturne: Blue and Gold (1872–75). Whistler, of course, developed his mature style through looking at Japanese prints, and the Tate’s note for his painting says it may have been derived from a Hiroshige print. The Hiroshige looks nothing like the High Bridge at Night, however; was the latter based on an earlier print which Whistler had seen, or is the High Bridge (which post-dates Whistler’s painting) an example of the Japanese stealing back some of their influence from the West?

(Thanks to Wood s Lot for the prints tip.)

ARAI, Yoshimune II–”A Ferry Boat”

KOBAYASHI, Eijiro–”A Pagoda by Moonlight”

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Sidney Sime paintings

Painting of Waves.

Most of the art for which Sidney Sime (1867–1941) is remembered is black-and-white or monochrome work, in part because he was engaged as a magazine illustrator at a time prior to widespread colour reproduction. All of the reproductions in Sidney Sime—Master of the Mysterious (1980) by Simon Heneage & Henry Ford are monochrome, so it’s good to find 188 of Sime’s paintings on the BBC’s British paintings website. Or it’s good up to a point… Most of the works are small oil sketches and landscape studies which would be of little interest if the artist’s name was unfamiliar. The examples here are some of the few which match the unique imagination which people still value today. Heneage & Ford refer to his painting throughout his career but it seems the best of that work must now be in private collections. All of the paintings on the BBC pages are from the collection at the Sidney H. Sime Memorial Gallery at Worplesdon near Guildford, Surrey, where there’s more of his art to be seen.

Woods and Dark Animals.

Illustrative.

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Keep Your Timber Limber

Untitled drawing by Tom of Finland.

Tom of Finland’s beefy clones arrive within cruising distance of Buckingham Palace this week as part of an exhibition of drawings at the ICA. Keep Your Timber Limber is subtitled Works on Paper, and features contributions from eight artists old and new: Judith Bernstein, Tom of Finland, George Grosz, Margaret Harrison, Mike Kuchar, Cary Kwok, Antonio Lopez and Marlene McCarty.

Keep Your Timber Limber (Works on Paper) explores how artists since the 1940s to the present day have used drawing to address ideas critical and current to their time, ranging from the politics of gender and sexuality, to feminist issues, war and censorship. Stretching from fashion to erotica, the works can all be viewed as being in some way transgressive, employing traditional and commercial drawing techniques to challenge specific social, political or stylistic conventions.

The piece below by Cary Kwok isn’t one of those on display; according to BUTT magazine he’ll be showing a new series of his Biro fantasias. All the more reason to get to the ICA if you can. The exhibition runs to September 8th, 2013.

Pole Dance (2005) by Cary Kwok.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

John Austen’s Hamlet

The 1922 edition of Hamlet “decorated” by British artist John Austen (1886–1948) is a lot more visible today than it was a few years ago, thanks to a reprint by Dover Publications in their Calla Editions series. The scans here are from an original printing at VTS. Austen’s Hamlet is often rated as his chef d’oeuvre, and with good reason, he manages to lend some visual splendour to a play whose concerns are a lot more introspective than the usual illustration standards of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Masks, swords and skulls are recurrent symbols. Yes, the drawings owe a great deal to Harry Clarke’s example—all those manga faces, spiny fingers and swathes of black—but that’s no bad thing if you can pull it off. If you’re going to borrow a style then you may as well take from the best.

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Weekend links 164

Ekaterina Panikanova paints on books.

Back in 2009 I bought a book of Art Nouveau illustration and design which contained an intriguing drawing by an Austrian artist, Franz Wacik (1883–1938). At the time there was little of Wacik’s other work online so I was delighted by the latest post at 50 Watts which showcases a selection of his illustrations. Wacik was a contemporary of British illustrator Sidney Sime, and both artists share a predilection for the comic and the grotesque.

• “The outlawing of drugs such as cannabis, MDMA and LSD amounts to the ‘the worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Copernicus and Galileo’, the former Government drugs advisor Professor David Nutt has claimed.” Related: “At last, the edifice of drugs prohibition is starting to crumble,” says Amanda Feilding.

• Alan Johnston on “A gay island community created by Italy’s Fascists”, and at Another Nickel In The Machine a report on The Gateways Club, one of the few meeting places for London’s lesbians in the 1960s. Alex Park wonders “Why Is Gay Porn So Popular In Pakistan?”

• If it’s June 16th then it must be Bloomsday: The Irish Times has a page of Joyce-related links to mark the anniversary. This year there’s a global reading of Ulysses taking place.

• “Now we can concentrate on album number nine,” says Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hutter. The rest of us will impatiently count the passing seconds.

• After a week in which George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has seen an increase in sales, a look at its cover designs old and new.

• Aleister Crowley: Wandering the Waste is a 144-page graphic biography of the Great Beast by Martin Hayes and RH Stewart.

• Barnbrook Design‘s presentation of Taxidermy, a book by Alexis Turner, is rather splendid.

• FACT Mix 386 is a great collection of dubby grooves compiled by Young Echo.

• From 2001: Michael Wood in the LRB reviewing Apocalypse Now Redux.

• The first recording of Allen Ginsberg reading Howl.

• Rejoyce (1967) by Jefferson Airplane | The Sensual World (1989) by Kate Bush | Molly Bloom (2013) by Alan Munde