Category: {black and white}

Black and white art

Austin Spare in Glasgow

Austin Spare

Self-portrait by Austin Osman Spare (1907).

A late discovery but worth a mention, an Austin Spare exhibition that’s been running in Glasgow this month. From the press release:

An exhibition of 13 prints from this great artist and Occultist will run until 29th September 2007 at Mono, King’s Court, King Street Glasgow.

We have a diverse array of his styles to exhibit, and some of these have never been exhibited publicly before. We begin in 1921 with “The Magic Circle”, through his renowned “Ugly Ecstasy” drawings of 1924 (3 drawings & Grotesque), a demonic watercolour featuring a three headed demon?one of whose heads is Cthulhu, a postcard with drawing of his friend the bohemian writer Oswell Blakeston as Satyr and message about his art show on the reverse, “Self Portrait as Satyr” significantly signed ZOSAOS, a sidereal pastel entitled “Dire Awakening”, a watercolour which depicts a kind of celestial phallus endowing the receiver with “ecstasy” and a lambent woman, “Punch and Judy”, “The Return” and ending with “The Death Mask of Voltaire”—painted two years before the artist’s death, and being a meditation on death itself.

As our opening night of the exhibition show was so popular and created so much interest, we are thinking of having an end-of-exhibition get together to discuss Zos and the effect it’s had on people, so if Zos has inspired you, let me know or leave a message on our MySpace at myspace.com/23enigmashop and we’ll let you where and when.

We have produced a catalogue to mark this unique occasion in Scottish occulture and to honour the memory of AOS/ZOS. The catalogue is a folio containing a three page essay on Zos, specially written for us and kindly donated by Michael Staley. The 13 artworks from our exhibition have been expertly reproduced, and photographic quality prints made. These are all included in the catalogue, we also have a range of t-shirts, a set of 13 postcards of the prints from the exhibition and individual full scale prints for sale which are truly stunning.

Via Midian Books.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Austin Osman Spare

The recurrent pose 7

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The Flandrin pose returns in a photograph for the Adonis series by Brent Dundore. Flandrin was striving for a Classical simplicity in his original painting and the quasi-Classical seat in this picture seems to be doing the same. This might easily become a line drawing like those produced by John Flaxman, a contemporary of Flandrin’s whose work was inspired by Classical sources.

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“Athena in the form of Penelope’s sister tells the queen of the return of her son Telemachus” from illustrations for The Odyssey by John Flaxman (1810).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

Giorgio Ghisi’s Allegory of Life

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Allegory of Life or The Dream of Raphael (detail, 1561).

The British Museum’s description:

This famous print is often called The Dream of Raphael, because the lettering at the bottom states that the design is by Raphael. However, the accumulation of incidental detail is wholly uncharacteristic of Raphael’s style and no one believes that it is by him. Nor has anyone completely explained the esoteric subject.

A boat has been wrecked by turbulent and rocky river, in the foreground. It points to the bearded man, who leans on the trunk of a dead tree, with a bat, two owls and a crow above him. In the lettered state of the plate (signed and dated 1561), the blank panel at the base of the tree is filled with an inscription from Virgil’s Aeneid VI, 617: SEDET AETERNVM / QVI SEDEBIT INFOELIX (“He will sit forever who sits unfortunate”). The man is surrounded by monstrous creatures who eye him venomously. His only hope appears to come from the goddess-like woman with a long spear who appears on the right. She might be Reason, come to rescue a philosopher, but with no explanation to help us, her significance remains obscure.

Ghisi (1520–82) was trained in the Italian engraving style pioneered by Marcantonio Raimondi. He left Rome in 1550 to join the Antwerp publishing enterprise of Hieronymous Cock, where he introduced Roman High Renaissance art to northern Europe through his reproductive engravings. He was in Paris from 1556 to 1567, where he probably engraved this allegory, his most famous print.

See the complete print at large size here.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Les lieux imaginaires d’Erik Desmazières

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Labyrinthe II (2003).

This is very late notice but I only just discovered that there’s been a major exhibition of etchings by Erik Desmazières running at the Jenisch Gallery in Vevey, Switzerland. The exhibition, which ends on September 9th, includes these more recent works among over 100 other pieces covering the extent of the artist’s career. Sounds like the catalogue for this would certainly be worth ordering. There’s also a 40-minute documentary film being shown there, Le Paris d’Erik by Bertrand Renaudineau and Gérard Emmanuel da Silva.

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Théâtre de géographie (2007).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Erik Desmazières

Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia

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Or Lust (1919), Envy (1919) and Pride (1918). Very Beardsley-esque posters by Carlo Nicco for a series of Italian films from the silent era starring Francesca Bertini. Doubtless the prolific Ms. Bertini’s demonstrations of the Seven Deadly Sins inspired similar promotional artwork for the other films in the series but these are the only ones visible from this Flickr collection of Italian cinema memorabilia. As with Alla Nazimova’s Salomé (and Gabriel D’Annunzio’s excessive Salammbô-esque epic, Cabiria), this confirms again that fin de siècle Decadence lived on in the early days of cinema, having been banished (for a time) from the worlds of art and literature.

Via Fabulon. (Thanks Thom!)

Continue reading “Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia”