Weekend links 773

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The Tower of Babel from Turris Babel (1679) by Athanasius Kircher, showing how wide the Tower would have to be at its base to reach the Moon.

• The week’s literary resurrection: Penguin announced Shadow Ticket, a new novel by Thomas Pynchon. “Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering…”

• The week’s musical resurrection: Stereolab announced Instant Holograms On Metal Film, their first new album since Not Music in 2010. Aerial Troubles is the new single with a video which has prompted complaints in the comments about the use of AI treatments for the visuals.

• At Public Domain Review: Modern Babylon: Ziggurat Skyscrapers and Hugh Ferriss’ Retrofuturism, a long read by Eva Miller. Previously: The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferriss.

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: Ben Wickey is selling some of the original art from his Lives of the Great Enchanters pages.

• At Wormwoodiana: The Golden Age of Second-Hand Bookshops is now. Mark Valentine explains.

• “Alvin Lucier is still making music four years after his death – thanks to an artificial brain.”

• At Colossal: Hundreds of fantastic creatures inhabit a sprawling universe by Vorja Sánchez.

• Coming soon from Radiance Films: A blu-ray disc of Essential Polish Animation.

• Pattern design and illustration by Gail Myerscough.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Homage Script.

• New music: Sabi by Odalie.

• RIP Max Romeo.

Babylon (1968) by Dr John | War In A Babylon It Sipple Out Deh (1976) by Max Romeo | Babylonian Tower (1982) by Minimal Compact

Minotaure, 1933–1939

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Art by Diego Rivera for the Mexican supplement in Minotaure no. 13.

I was tempted to title this one Minotaure! since I’ve been searching for copies of the magazine in question for many years. I’m certain I went looking in all the usual sources last year in the run-up to the Surrealist centenary, without success. Anyway, here they all are at last, a complete run of one of the major Surrealist periodicals.

Minotaure was notable for a number of reasons, first among them the publisher, Albert Skira, whose resources enabled the production of a very desirable item, with good design, colour prints in each issue, and plenty of photos and other artwork throughout. The Surrealist publications of the 1920s had been historically important but all of them were monochrome documents with few pictures and few pages. Minotaure had the production values of a quality magazine and an impressive roster of artists and writers to fill each issue. Skira and editor E. Tériade originally intended their periodical to cover a wide range of art, past and present, but with most of the early contributors being members of André Breton’s Surrealist circle the magazine quickly became a showcase for Surrealist art and theorising. The first issue featured a cover by Pablo Picasso, with more Picasso artwork inside. Subsequent issues had covers by leading Surrealist artists–Dalí, Ernst, Magritte, Masson–which captured the movement at a time before Breton’s persistent expulsions hollowed out the original group. Breton writes in nearly all the issues but was forbidden from using Minotaure as a political platform (the previous Surrealist journal had been the very political Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution), a restriction he kept to. His manner was often dictatorial but he always had an eye for the main chance, or the bonne chance in this case.

The written contents of Minotaure are mostly in French but the pictorial matter is worth seeing even if much of it is very familiar today. Among the written highlights are two essays by Salvador Dalí, the first on the “edible” nature of Art Nouveau architecture, with an emphasis on the work of Gaudí; the second about Pre-Raphaelite painting. It’s understandable that Dalí would be attracted by the meticulous realism of early Millais and William Holman Hunt but I didn’t know his essay included an analysis of Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd, a painting I look at every time I’m in the Manchester Art Gallery. Elsewhere there are articles about automatism, mediumship, the decalcomania technique in painting, the esoteric symbolism of the alchemists, naive or untutored art, and plenty of single-page items and visual novelties. Photography by Man Ray and Brassaï is a recurrent feature. Skira’s magazine established a template which the two American Surrealist periodicals of the 1940s, View and VVV, did their best to follow. Now that Minotaure is freely available I’ll be waiting impatiently for complete runs of its followers to turn up somewhere.

(Note: some of the copies linked below have had their colour prints removed.)


Minotaure no. 1 (1933)

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Cover art by Pablo Picasso.

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Minotaure no. 2 (1933)

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Cover art by Gaston-Louis Roux.

Continue reading “Minotaure, 1933–1939”

Documents d’atelier: Art décoratif moderne

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These collections would have been useful when I was mining my Art Nouveau reference books while working on the Bumper Book of Magic. Documents d’atelier is a two-volume overview of the Nouveau idiom as it manifested throughout the worlds of art and design, from architecture and housing interiors, to jewellery, ceramics and so on. The books were compiled in 1899 by Victor Champier, and no doubt draw on the resources of Revue des arts décoratifs, the magazine that Champier edited from 1880 to 1902. The Nouveau era didn’t last very long but it generated many guides of this kind, not all of which are useful if you’re looking for something to work from. Documents d’atelier is better than most in presenting actual works rather than speculative designs, and with more variety than you find in other guides. The colouring is also an attractive feature: black-and-white photos have been tinted in pastel shades to match the colour reproductions. The creators of each design are credited on the pages so you don’t have to go hunting through an index.

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Both these volumes are hosted at Gallica where the web interface remains as inefficent as ever. If you want to see more pages I recommend downloading the PDFs rather than trying to leaf through the things online.

Volume 1 | Volume 2

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Continue reading “Documents d’atelier: Art décoratif moderne”

A Day of Expo 70

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Poster design by Yusaku Kamekura.

More expositiana. Expo 2025 opens in Osaka in April, 55 years after the last expo staged in the city. Looking at the Expo 2025 website I can’t see the event generating much interest 50 years from now the way that Expo 70 does today. Expo 70 is the only 20th-century exhibition with any substantial cult value, something I’d guess to be a combination of several factors. On the design and architecture fronts the exposition was especially notable, with a great logo, great posters, and pavilions that look like a future that never arrived. In the 21st century the Japanese dimension of Expo 70 adds to its attraction; among other things the event is the only exposition whose site gets trashed by battling kaiju monsters, as happens at the end of Gamera vs. Jiger.

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The Tower of the Sun from the Expo 70 Official Guide.

Then there’s the centrepiece of the event site, Taro Okamoto’s Tower of the Sun, which joins the Eiffel Tower, the Brussels Atomium and Seattle’s Space Needle in being an exposition remnant that future generations have decided to preserve. Okamoto’s Tower is the strangest of all the surviving exposition structures, the creation of a multi-talented artist, designer and jazz drummer (!) who exhibited with the Surrealists in Paris in the 1930s. Now that the Tower is now left standing alone in open parkland it seems more like the world’s largest Surrealist sculpture. In 2018 Kôsai Sekine released a feature-length documentary, Tower of the Sun, about the artist and the construction of his tower.

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A Day of Expo 70.

A Day of Expo 70 is a much shorter documentary made to promote New Zealand’s involvement with the exposition. This is one of the longer English-language films made while the expo was still in progress, and one of many films about the event at this dedicated YouTube channel. Most of the clips are in Japanese, like this three-hour TV special, but still worth seeing for the documentary detail. For French speakers there’s an hour-long documentary at the Radio Canada archives. And while I usually dislike the pointless upscaling of old film and video material this clip shows overhead views of the expo site from the monorail and the cable cars.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Impressions of Expo 67
Expositiana
The exposition moiré
Angkor in Paris, 1931
The world of the future
Space Needle USA
A Trip to the Moon, 1901
Le Panorama Exposition Universelle
Exposition cornucopia
The Evanescent City

Impressions of Expo 67

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I ought to have included this miniature in the collection of exposition films I posted a couple of years ago. Impressions of Expo 67 was made by William Brind for the National Film Board of Canada. It’s a lot shorter than Henry Charles Fleischer’s home-movie record of the Montreal exposition but has the edge over Fleischer’s shaky, hand-held shots by being very smartly shot and edited. Brind also avoids spoiling his film with over-eager narration, what you get is eight minutes of light-rail journeys, international visitors and speculative architecture, all of it scored by a groovy soundtrack.

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The architecture had a lot to recommend it at this expo: the inverted pyramid of the Canadian pavilion, Buckminster Fuller’s enormous geodesic dome (one of the few structures still standing today), the “Gyrotron” pyramid, and Frei Otto’s West German pavilion whose membranous roof looks forward to the stadium he designed for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Wikimedia Commons has a detailed map of the entire site.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Expositiana
The exposition moiré
Angkor in Paris, 1931
The world of the future
Space Needle USA
A Trip to the Moon, 1901
Le Panorama Exposition Universelle
Exposition cornucopia
The Evanescent City