September 2013 – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Balanchine, Lynes and Orpheus

The photo above has appeared here before—it’s one of a number of dance photos taken by the great George Platt Lynes—but its subject has (for me at least) always been the source of some confusion. Since I dislike being nagged by petty conundrums I make a cursory search every so often to see if more details might be found. Five years ago all I knew was that the picture appeared in Philip Core’s Camp: The Lie that Tells the Truth (1984) where it was credited as showing dancers from Balanchine’s Icarus. Additional confusion was sown by a photo site showing the picture below with a statement that it was a) a Lynes photo (correct), and b) from Balanchine’s Die Fledermaus (wrong). No dates were given. The presence of a lyre made Orpheus seem a more likely subject: Balanchine wrote an Orpheus ballet for a Stravinsky score in 1948 but photos of that production showed very different dancers and costumes.

It turns out that these photos are indeed for a Balanchine ballet on the Orpheus theme, a short-lived production, Orpheus and Eurydice, from 1936 based on music from Gluck’s opera. The dancers are Lew Christensen, William Dollar and Daphne Vane. What’s most surprising now is having found a photo that’s almost but not quite the one from the Core book; photos from this session are elusive, with searches hampered by other photos taken by Lynes of Balanchine’s later ballets. There may be more in this series.

Pinterest is a good place to see more of Lynes’ photos which range from fashion shoots and celebrity portraits to moody, and occasionally surreal, homoerotica.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The end of Orpheus
• The recurrent pose 17
• George Platt Lynes

Old New Orleans

If you know the names Lafcadio Hearn and Joseph Pennell it’s surprising to see them brought together for this 1885 guide to the city of New Orleans. Hearn is better known for his many books about the folklore of Japan and China, while Pennell was a highly regarded artist and illustrator with a predilection for impressionistic cityscapes. The book is part of the Internet Archive so details are scant but it looks like a gathering together of prior work about the city with no single author—Hearn and others are credited inside. The deteriorated glamour of New Orleans means the illustrations are more picturesque than usual. Hearn had a fascination with ghost stories so he’d no doubt appreciate the view of the Haunted House on Royal Street. Browse the rest of the book here or download it here.

Continue reading “Old New Orleans”

Digital Grotesque

These organic forms are details of an architectural environment produced in sandstone using a 3D printer. The project is a collaboration between Michael Hansmeyer and Benjamin Dillenburger who use a series of algorithms to create the shapes the printer produces:

In the Digital Grotesque project, we use these algorithms to create a form that appears at once synthetic and organic. The design process thus strikes a delicate balance between the expected and the unexpected, between control and relinquishment. The algorithms are deterministic as they do not incorporate randomness, but the results are not necessarily entirely foreseeable. Instead, they have the power to surprise.

The resulting architecture does not lend itself to a visual reductionism. Rather, the processes can devise truly surprising topographies and topologies that go far beyond what one could have traditionally conceived.

The diagram below shows the scale of the completed structure. Regular readers won’t be surprised to hear that the first thing that came to my mind when looking at these photos was “Lovecraft!” This unpredictable rendering process immediately solves the problem of how to depict or construct a non-human architecture without resort to anything Earth-bound. Those ridged and fluted columns could be R’lyeh or they could equally be the vast and ancient buildings that Dyer and Danforth discover in At the Mountains of Madness. I’ve been waiting for a while for 3D printing to start moving beyond the mere replication of existing objects; this is a very promising development. There’s more detail about the process and construction at the Digital Grotesque site.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• At the Mountains of Madness

Magicians

The stage variety rather than occult practitioners. The levitating Mephistopheles above is the one I borrowed earlier this year for the Alas Vegas Tarot designs. “Kellar” was Harry Kellar (1849–1922), a popular American magician blessed with some talented poster designers who stripped away the superfluous text to concentrate on his name and the recurrent motif of a red devil. Considering their age (they date from around 1900) these posters are surprisingly elusive, with no indication on some of them that Kellar is a stage performer at all. He retired in 1908 so by this time his name alone was evidently enough of an audience draw.

Howard Thurston was Kellar’s appointed successor, hence the continuity of the red devils and type design. Devils and imps weren’t the sole property of the pair as the other examples here demonstrate. “Miss Baldwin” is a rare example of a woman achieving parity with her male colleagues, at least in the poster department. All these posters are from the collection at the Library of Congress where many more examples may be seen. A detail from the horizontal Kellar poster below appears on the cover of the recent lavish Taschen volume Magic: 1400s–1950s by Mike Caveney, Jim Steinmeyer, Ricky Jay and Noel Daniel.

Continue reading “Magicians”

Salomé cigarettes

Many food and drink brands are still marketed today as exotic pleasures; some long-running products—Fry’s Turkish Delight, for example—even continue to sell themselves via an Orientalist mystique that now seems quite outmoded. This will never happen again with cigarettes, of course, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see it tried with cannabis if it’s ever legalised.

Salome Ideal was a brand of gold-tipped scented cigarette sold to American women from 1915 to the late 1940s. I’ve not been able to find out how they were scented but the figure on the pack is a flagrant borrowing from photos of Maud Allan’s scandalous Dance of the Seven Veils. This page has a couple of ad designs.

Maud Allan c. 1908.

Emil Cardinaux poster from 1914 may have been for the same brand of cigarette or for a different one of the same name. Cardinaux was a Swiss advertising artist so it’s possible there was a Salomé cigarette for European smokers. More of Cardinaux’s poster art can be seen in this Pinterest collection.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive