{architecture} – Page 101

Weekend links 64

The Sixteenth of September (1956) by René Magritte.

To Magritte admirers, The Sixteenth of September is a deceptively realistic work painted in 1956, one of a series in which the artist plays tricks with light and time of day. It shows a crescent moon impossibly shining through the dark mass of a tree, against a dawn sky.

To [Marc] Bolan fans, the painting has an entirely different significance: 16 September 1977 was the date the singer was returning home in the small hours from a night out, in a Mini driven by his girlfriend Gloria Jones. […] Fans say the tree in the painting closely resembles the sycamore the car crashed into, and the moon was at the same phase on 16 September 1977. (more)

• New Yorkers finally got a successful vote for gay marriage making New York state the sixth and largest in the US giving full marriage rights to its gay citizens. One of America’s conservative journals, National Review, made the striking point that forty years ago New York was in the vanguard of gay liberation while Spain under Franco was a dictatorship with no gay rights at all. No one then would have bet on Spain beating New York to gay marriage rights as it did in 2005. Allow me to note that we still only have civil unions here in the UK.

• Related: Queer Beacon: LGBT spaces in New York City by Kian Goh, and at Scientific American: The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Natural Selection and Evolution, with a Key to Many Complicating Factors by Jeremy Yoder.

• A pair of intrepid photographers breach the midnight security at St Paul’s Cathedral to bring back photos of the building rooftop. Related (and looking like a good location for a British equivalent of Stalker), photos of the disused Thorpe Marsh Power Station, Yorkshire.

• Mixtape of the month: the ATP I’ll Be Your Mirror collection by Portishead, a great blend of rock, rap and electronic odds-and-ends. Also a dash of Alan Moore & Stephen O’Malley.

• Eddie Campbell is blogging again. Welcome back to the madhouse, Eddie. His smart and witty daughter, Hayley Campbell, continues to file regular bulletins from her London bunker.

• Your Tumblrs this week: Fuck Yeah Ken Russell and Fuck Yeah Powell & Pressburger.

• Robot Flâneur: Exploring Google Street View.

• Paris Visages by Marco Gervasio.

• “Push the button, Max!”

• Written On The Forehead (2011) by PJ Harvey.

Friedrich and Schinkel

Abbey among Oak Trees (1809 or 1810) by Caspar David Friedrich.

More from the Google Art Project. In these views we get to see some of the subtleties in the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), a master at rendering fine gradations of light and shade. The paintings are from the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and Google’s photographs look far better than any book reproductions I’ve seen (assuming you have a decent monitor).

Moonrise over the Sea (1822) by Caspar David Friedrich.

Solitary Tree (1822) by Caspar David Friedrich.

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Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #25

A design by Emanuel Margold.

This post concludes the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 25 covers the period from October 1909 to March 1909, and while the Internet Archive has further editions available they make a big jump after this number to 1923. The later editions are still interesting, of course, but in presentation and content they’re very different to what went before. Despite the text of these magazines being entirely German it’s been an education going through them not only for the detailed attention given to artists often passed over in books, but also for the articles reporting notable events in European art history as they happened. We have the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto to thank for having made these publications available.

An illustration from a series by Carl Otto Czeschka for Die Nibelungen by Franz Keim.

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Passage 15

Directing your attention elsewhere again today, to the latest edition of Passage the Dutch webzine run by my good friend Ed Jansen. Number 15 is described thus:

Passage 15 is, with a few exceptions, entirely devoted to art. Images govern our lives, literally and figuratively. Gaudier-Brzeska nearly a hundred years ago and Antony Gormley today affect our way of looking. Odd Nerdrum does so with his painting on a very different way. The music of Polly Jean Harvey made us curious about her sources of inspiration. The piece about Gallipoli is actually a kind of enormous footnote to her latest cd “Let England Shake”. The photo section provides an overview of exhibitions and performances in the past few months in and around The Hague, Netherlands.

Seeing Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculptures reminds me that I haven’t seen Ken Russell’s film of the artist’s life, Savage Messiah, for many years. The large Antony Gormley work on the cover (Exposure) makes a welcome change from the artist’s cast-iron clones. I’m still waiting for Gormley to create the Ejaculating Man, a seawater-spurting statue he proposed for Seattle. It was rejected, of course, and it’s difficult to imagine any American city exhibiting something of that nature given the current climate. Maybe he should try Amsterdam.

Back at Ed’s work, his varied Flickr stream includes some recent views of Futuro, a mobile holiday home designed by Matti Suuronen in 1968. What was once futuristic now has a Jetsons-like retro glamour.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Passage 14
• Passage 13
• Passage 12
• Passage 11
• Passage 10

Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #22

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 22 covers the period from April 1908 to September 1908, and the highlight of this issue is a series of ink drawings (above and below) by Carl Otto Czeschka, another member of the Wiener Werkstätte. Also in this edition is a feature on Gustav Klimt’s controversial Faculty Paintings. As usual, anyone wishing to see these samples in greater detail is advised to download the entire number at the Internet Archive. There’ll be more DK&D next week.

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