Liceti’s monsters

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Illustrations from De monstrorum natura, caussis, et differentiis libri duo (On the nature, causes and differences of monsters, 1616) by Italian scientist Fortunio Liceti who we’re told has a crater on the Moon named after him. Further images from Liceti and his contemporaries can be found at Les Monstres de la Renaissance à l’âge classique, an online exhibition of assorted teratisms, prodigies and abominations. Via Monsieur Peacay, no monster he.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Weekend links 24

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Delta-Wing (2009) by Chloe Early.

• “Feted British authors are limited, arrogant and self-satisfied, says leading academic”. Stating the bleeding obvious but it still needs to be said, apparently, especially when the announcement of the Booker list this year caused the usual confusion when Amis Jr. and McEwan weren’t included, as though the mere existence of their novels makes them prize-worthy. And as someone pointed out, the word “male” is missing from that headline.

• Hero of Comic-Book World Gets Real: Alan Moore again, in the NYT this time. Related: a review of Unearthing live.

• Announcing The Hanky Code by Brian Borland & Stephen S Mills, a 40-poem book to be published next year by Lethe Press. For an explanation of the Hanky Code there’s this, and there’s also an iPhone app.

• Folk—the ‘music of the people’—is now hip again, says (who else?) Rob Young who can also be heard on the archived podcast here. Related: the folk roots of Bagpuss. Related to the latter: The Mouse Mill.

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An endpiece from The Firebird and other Russian Fairy Tales by Boris Zvorykin.

• ‘Yes’ to Catastrophe: Roger Dean, Prog and SF. A lengthy and thoughtful analysis of Roger Dean’s early work.

• Into the Media Web, the enormous Michael Moorcock book which I designed, is officially published this week.

• Cassette playa: in praise of tapes. I’ve complained about tapes in the past but people continue to find them useful. Some technologies die harder than others.

• Boy BANG Boy: “Quiet moments made suddenly very loud with the attitude and opinion of what it means to be a young male in an impossibly diverse world.” An exhibition opening at Eastgallery, London, on August 5th.

• Empty your heart of its mortal dream: Alfred Kubin’s extraordinary novel, The Other Side.

• Ghostly and Boym Partners devise a new way to deliver digital music.

• Besti-mix #27: a great selection by producer Adrian Sherwood.

• Agnostics are troublemakers. Amen to that.

• RIP Harry Beckett.

• Acousmata.

• Let Us Go In To The House Of The Lord by Pharoah Sanders (live, 1971): Part 1 | Part 2

The Golden Book

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top left: Gordon Ertz; top right: George M Richards.
bottom left: Constance Wheeler; bottom right: Boris Artzybasheff.

Covers from an American adventure story magazine which ran from 1925–1935. Very lavish designs compared to the pulps it was competing against. From the excellent selection at MagazineArt.org.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Boris Artzybasheff, 1899–1965

The art of Ran Akiyoshi, 1922–1982

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In a similar vein to the work of Gilles Rimbault and other erotic fantasists is Ran Akiyoshi, a Japanese artist and illustrator. Akiyoshi’s work manages to be even more obscure than the Europeans, being virtually undocumented outside Japanese websites, hence the absence of titles and dates for these examples. This is surprising given the quasi-Surrealist nature of his paintings which place buxom goddess types in phantasmagoric settings with subtle or not-so-subtle erotic qualities. Akiyoshi follows the pattern of much of this kind of personal fantasy whereby most of the women share similar features. The book cover immediately below is from a recent Japan-only collection of his work. The Illusion cover at the end is another book collection some of whose fascinating pages can be seen here. As always, if anyone turns up a gallery of further pictures, please leave a comment.

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Continue reading “The art of Ran Akiyoshi, 1922–1982”

The art of Gilles Rimbault

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The relaxing of constraints in the 1960s produced a breed of artist which hardly seems to exist any more, invariably male and equally at home illustrating generic fantasy as producing delicately-rendered and frequently weird erotica. French artist Gilles Rimbault is one such, as was British underground artist Jim Leon, and another Frenchman, Raymond Bertrand. Unlike Leon and Bertrand, Rimbault’s work and information about the artist is frustratingly scarce. The first examples here are from covers of French science fiction magazines—also a source of work for Bertrand—while the samples below are a pair of intriguingly androgynous pieces of erotica from this page which gathers a number of similar Hans Bellmer-like works. If anyone turns up more of Rimbault’s drawings, please leave a comment.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Jim Leon, 1938–2002
• The art of Sibylle Ruppert
• The art of Bertrand