{art} – Page 251 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 268

A City on Pluto (1940) by Frank R. Paul. Related: Paul’s predictions about life on other planets.

• 23 Skidoo’s Peel Session from September 16th, 1981. Only 18 minutes of music but I’m thrilled for its being unique material that’s never been given an official release. There are many more Peel Sessions at the uploader’s channel, not all of which were reissued on the Strange Fruit label. Download favourites in their as-broadcast form (some with John Peel’s introductions) before they vanish or get blocked like the 1981 Cabaret Voltaire session. Related: Wikipedia’s list of Peel Sessions.

• Mixes of the week comprise two collections by Jon Dale of strange and beguiling Italian music: The Prevarications Of The Sky Against The Earth and La Verifica Incerta; the Summer Window Mix (“telly detritus, new-not-new synth nonsense & off-colour pop oddities”) by Moon Wiring Club; and Secret Thirteen Mix 158 by Haunter Records.

• “Hello, this is David Bowie. It’s a bit grey out today but I’ve got some Perrier water, and I’ve got a bunch of records…” Two hours of the Thin White Duke playing favourite music on BBC Radio One, 20th May, 1979.

Some of Vidal’s guests were writers, not exactly his favorite group. “Writers are the only people who are reviewed by people of their own kind,” Vidal said in an interview. “And their own kind can often be reasonably generous—if you stay in your category. I don’t. I do many different things rather better than most people do one thing. And envy is the central fact of American life.”

Frank Pizzoli reviews Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal by Michael Mewshaw

• Yair Elazar Glotman’s new album, Études, conjures “bone-rattling resonance, thick, alien-like atmospheres, and percussive fragments”. Stream it in full here.

• London’s Lost Department Store of the Swinging Sixties: Inge Oosterhoff on the splendours of Biba.

• It’s that Ungeziefer again: Richard T. Kelly on 100 years of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

• The History of Creepy Dolls: Linda Rodriguez McRobbie explores the uncanny valley.

• At Dangerous Minds: Matt Groening tells the story of The Residents in 1979.

• The NYT collects NASA’s photos from the New Horizons Pluto flyby.

• The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments

• Written on the Body: tattoos in cinema

• The Doll’s House (1981) by Landscape | Voodoo Dolly (1981) by Siouxsie and the Banshees | Devils Doll Baby (1986) by Sonny Sharrock

The art of Nicholas Tolmachev

Au Printemps.

A Ukrainian artist based in Paris, Nicholas Tolmachev’s paintings of youthful figures are haunted by birds and bees. Most of these are from the artist’s Behance page but there’s more at Tumblr.

BG.

The Big Kiss.

Continue reading “The art of Nicholas Tolmachev”

The art of Arkhip Kuindzhi, 1842–1910

Red Sunset on the Dnieper (c. 1905–1908).

Another Russian painter I’d not come across before, Arkhip Kuindzhi had a fondness for sunsets, moonlight and isolated plumes of cumulus, all of which he painted and repainted obsessively. The obvious model for these atmospheric studies is Caspar David Friedrich although Kuindzhi’s work isn’t as hyper-real, and lacks Friedrich’s Romantic mysticism. One detail that stood out for me in reading about Kuindzhi’s career was that Nicholas Roerich was one of his art pupils. Anyone familiar with Roerich’s paintings of Himalayan mountains will recognise a precursor in his teacher’s many studies of Mount Elbrus and other Caucasus peaks.

Clouds (1905).

The Elbrus, Moonlit Night (1890–1895).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vasily Vereshchagin’s temples
• Friedrich and Schinkel
• Winter light

Weekend links 267

Black Fever (2010) by Polly Morgan.

• “She was something of an Auntie Mame figure for me. We spent years haunting secondhand bookstores in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and New York, talking for hours over ever more bizarre dishes of Chinese Hakka cuisine in a hole-in-the-wall eatery at Stockton and Broadway in San Francisco, watching Kenneth Anger flicks and the surrealistic stop-motion puppet masterpieces of Ladislas Starevich, which Tom Luddy would screen for us at the Pacific Film Archive, over and over again until our eyeballs nearly fell out.” Steve Wasserman remembers Susan Sontag.

• California Dreams is “the first career-spanning compendium of Mouse’s work; it includes his recent landscapes and figurative paintings. Taken as a whole, the work is a weird, gilded, space-age, flame-licked way to chart the rise of late-twentieth-century youth culture”. Jeffery Gleaves on the psychedelic art of Stanley Mouse.

• “Not only does moral preoccupation corrupt the artfulness of fiction, but fiction is an inefficient and insincere vehicle for moralizing,” says Alice Gregory, joining Pankaj Mishra to address the question: “Do Moralists Make Bad Novelists?”

Nabokov’s posthumously published Lectures on Literature reprints a corny magazine ad that Nabokov liked to show to his students at Cornell, as an example of a certain kind of sunny American materialism and kitsch (or poshlost, in Russian): it’s an ad for flatware featuring a young housewife, hands clasped, eyes brimming as she contemplates a place setting. Nabokov titled it “Adoration of Spoons,” and it undoubtedly played a significant role in his creation of the suburban widow Charlotte Haze. From such strangely endearing trash was a masterpiece born.

John Colapinto reviewing Nabokov in America by Robert Roper

• “How many typefaces is too many typefaces?” asks Adrian Shaughnessy. “What happens to our ability to discriminate and exercise good judgment when we have a near-infinite number of possibilities?”

• At BUTT: a clip from one of the more dreamlike scenes in Wakefield Poole’s gay porn film, Bijou (1972). Poole’s “sensual memoir”, Dirty Poole, is published by Lethe Press.

• John Banville reviews The Prince of Minor Writers, selected essays of Max Beerbohm edited by Phillip Lopate.

• My thanks once again to Dennis Cooper for featuring this blog on his list of cultural favourites.

• More Moogery: Sarah Angliss, Gazelle Twin and Free School in the Moog Sound Lab.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 394 by Francesca Lombardo.

• Atlas Obscura gets to grips with the enormous Devil’s Bible.

• Feel You, a new song by Julia Holter.

• Spoonful (1960) by Howlin’ Wolf | Spoon (1972) by Can | Spoon (2013) by Mazzy Star

LVCIFER

An engraving of Dante’s encounter with Lucifer/Satan at the end of the Inferno. Illustrators of Dante have given us a number of depictions of Dante’s fallen angel—a monstrous beast with multiple wings and three heads; icy blasts from the wings travel through the circles of Hell—but this is one I’d not seen before. The engraving is by Cornelis Galle the Elder after a drawing by Lodovico Cardi (also known as Cigoli), and it’s unusual for showing Lucifer in full rather than the more common partial view of the monster imprisoned in the ice.

The engraving is another of those that depict several events in one image, with the figures of Virgil and Dante shown crossing the plain of ice then climbing down Lucifer’s body; passing the centre of the world Virgil (now carrying Dante) changes direction to account for the reversal of gravity. Climbing a rocky path, they emerge at the foot of Mount Purgatory to find Lucifer’s legs protruding from the stone. The reversal of gravity is one of the more advanced ideas in The Divine Comedy, as is the general idea of a spherical Earth. What Dante doesn’t mention, and few artists show, is Lucifer’s sexless groin positioned at the Centrum Mundi, a detail accounted for here. (Larger version.)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lachman’s Inferno
• Hell, a film by Rein Raamat
• Inferni
• Mirko Racki’s Inferno
• Albert Goodwin’s fantasies
• Harry Lachman’s Inferno
• Melancholy Lucifers
• Maps of the Inferno
• A TV Dante by Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway
• The last circle of the Inferno
• Angels 4: Fallen angels