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Merlin

Merlin building Stonehenge (14th century) from Folio 30r of British Library, Egerton 3028.

The Arthurian magus in art and illustration. Despite the antiquity of the Arthur legend there doesn’t seem to be much early representation of Merlin outside a few drawings in old manuscripts. The British Library’s folio showing the raising of Stonehenge is the oldest known depiction of the ancient structure.

Most of the pictures here are illustrations for the Merlin and Vivien section of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, the first book of which was published in 1859. Vivien (or Viviane, Nimue, etc) is the sorcerous Lady in the Lake who either imprisons Merlin underground or in a tree depending on whose account you read. Edward Burne-Jones’ The Beguiling of Merlin has long been my favourite of that artist’s paintings. This is only a very small selection of possible pictures, of course. A more complete catalogue would include Nicol Williamson in John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), a performance that some find overly mannered but one that I’ve always enjoyed.

Merlin and Vivien (1867) by Gustave Doré.

The Beguiling of Merlin (1874) by Edward Burne-Jones.

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Weekend links 289

Fathomless Sounding (1932) by Gertrude Hermes.

• Over at Greydogtales (“weird fiction, weird art and even weirder lurchers”) I talk about art, design, the writing of this blog, and I also reveal more about my ongoing Axiom project. The latter currently stands at two novels, a couple of half-finished stories and a few pieces of artwork. I may be unveiling some of the art in the new year so watch this space.

• Howard Brookner’s Burroughs: The Movie (1983), a definitive film portrait of William Burroughs, is released at last on DVD/Blu-ray. US-only for the moment but further releases elsewhere are promised. The director’s nephew, Aaron Brookner, has a documentary about his uncle released next year.

• “…beautifully articulated bawdiness, perverse pleasures and a radical, though nondidactic, political view.” Melissa Anderson reviews Boyd McDonald’s Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies.

The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method. Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them. Ellis and Silk accused these theorists of “moving the goalposts” of science and blurring the line between physics and pseudoscience. “The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable,” Ellis and Silk wrote, thereby disqualifying most of the leading theories of the past 40 years. “Only then can we defend science from attack.”

Natalie Wolchover on A Fight for the Soul of Science

• Mixes of the week: A mix by Front & Follow, and The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. XIV by David Colohan.

• “Psychedelics can’t be tested using conventional clinical trials,” says Nicolas Langlitz.

• At Dangerous Minds: Ralph Steadman illustrates Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

• Why does Moby-Dick (sometimes) have a hyphen? Erin Blakemore investigates.

• My thanks again to Dennis Cooper for including this blog on his year-end list.

• Cian Traynor was given 20 minutes to ask Ennio Morricone some questions.

• Lolita at 60: Ten writers reconsider Nabokov’s novel, page by page.

• At Ballardian: High-Rise: Wheatley vs Cronenberg.

• Poison Ivy: The Queen of Psychobilly Punk

• The Cinema of Hotels: a list

• Solo intimacy DIY

• Moby Dick (1970) by Led Zeppelin | William Burroughs Don’t Play Guitar (1996) by Islamic Diggers | Physical (2001) by Goldfrapp

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Washington Irving’s ghost story is illustrated by Frederick Simpson Coburn for an 1899 edition, with page decorations by celebrated book designer Margaret Armstrong. Coburn’s gloomy plates don’t look so good in this scanned copy but he also produced the many spot illustrations that run through the book. See the rest of the pages here.

Continue reading “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

Collagescapes

Oliver Wasow‘s artwork for It’s All Around You (2004), an album by US group Tortoise, contains some fine examples of disjunctive (Surrealist, if you must) collage landscapes. This is a sub-genre of collage that I’ve always enjoyed, especially when it’s carefully done, and I was wondering recently whether Wasow had done anything similar for other groups. Discogs has a few more examples, one of which looks like something from the masters of the photo-collage cover, Hipgnosis.

But searching was curtailed when I remembered a much earlier example of the disjunctive collagescape on the cover of Sort Of (1972) by Slapp Happy. I’d forgotten all about this superb piece by avant-garde filmmaker David Larcher which really needs to be seen on a 12-inch sleeve; this is one of those collages where the combination of careful composition, equalised light and shade, and concealed edges makes the picture seem at first glance like an ordinary photograph. Whether Larcher has produced more work of this quality, I can’t say. Another of his collages can be found at The Quietus where Cyclobe enthuse about his films. For more elaborate collagescapes you have to look elsewhere, to one of the prime exponents of the technique, Tsunehisa Kimura.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

The art of Gisbert Combaz, 1869–1941

More from this Belgian artist whose splendid Art Nouveau peacock is a regular feature in books about fin de siècle art and design. La Libre Esthetique was a salon for which Combaz produced a number of posters, a few more of which may be seen below. The salamander postcard seems to be part of another set devoted to the four elements; Combaz may have produced further series as there’s also a volcano card depicting fire. All of this work dates from the 1890s. A few years later Combaz’s art took a darker turn with a series of propaganda pieces reacting to events during the First World War.

Continue reading “The art of Gisbert Combaz, 1869–1941”