{art} – Page 277 – { feuilleton }

Papillons de Nuit, a film by Raoul Servais

From Homosurrealism to Belgio-surrealism. Papillons de Nuit (1997) is a short homage to the Surrealist painter Paul Delvaux featuring a handful of familiar Delvaux motifs including nocturnal tramcars and large-eyed, bare-breasted women. Raoul Servais had already borrowed some of Delvaux’s imagery for his feature-length fantasy, Taxandria (1994), but that film doesn’t sustain itself over its running time despite the involvement of Alain Robbe-Grillet and François Schuiten. Servais’s blend of live action and animation seems to work better in concentrated doses.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sirene by Raoul Servais
• Paul Delvaux: The Sleepwalker of Saint-Idesbald
• Harpya by Raoul Servais
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux

Homosurrealism

Untitled (2012) by Brian Oldham.

Jack Sanders was in touch recently about his online art showcase Homosurrealism, a gallery of homoerotics, the surreal and the occult. The fourth issue has just gone live, and the contents could just as well be described as Homo-occultism given the predominance of esoterica. Jean Cocteau and Kenneth Anger are in there, also William Burroughs via Gus Van Sant’s film of the Thanksgiving Prayer which receives a lot of exposure at this time of year.

La Petite Mort by John Waiblinger.

Also featured is my Sephiroth of the Great Old Ones from the Haunter of the Dark collection. Credit should be given there to Alan Moore who was responsible for the attribution of the various gods to the different spheres. In the book the chart is followed by my renderings of the sinister pantheon together with Alan’s description of each god and sphere.

The Great Old Ones: Sephiroth (1999) by John Coulthart & Alan Moore.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Salivation Army, a film by Scott Treleaven

Jean de Bosschère’s The City Curious

“…it’s a shame there isn’t more of [Jean de Bosschère’s] idiosyncratic work at the Internet Archive,” I wrote in 2012. The reason that Bosschère’s books aren’t immediately to hand is that the Internet Archive has misspelled his name in many of their tags, not the first time that searches there are thwarted by errors or missing data (illustrators often go uncredited).

The City Curious (1920) is one of several books that Bosschère wrote and illustrated, this edition being translated into English by F. Tennyson Jesse. The whimsical story was presumably intended for children but Bosschère’s imagination is a peculiar one, and his figures are often so eccentric they need to be studied closely to pick out faces and limbs from their details and distortion. Eccentricity isn’t unknown in children’s stories but this one is much closer to Surrealism than the Surrealist’s favourite Lewis Carroll books. Many more of these illustrations may be browsed here or downloaded here.

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Atmospherics

Listening to Joy Division over the weekend prompted another of those idle speculations that are immediately answered these days (so to speak…) by a few seconds of web searching. While Atmosphere was playing I’d remembered a conversation with a friend about the identity of the painting of a cowled figure that appears on the original Atmosphere/Dead Souls single for the Sordide Sentimental label. Neither of us had a copy of the Holy Grail of JD collectors, nor did we know anybody who owned one, so the discussion wasn’t very fruitful.

Licht Und Blindheit (1980) by Joy Division.

Sordide Sentimental were (and still are) a French company run by Jean-Pierre Turmel and Yves von Bontee whose speciality was limited releases of exclusive material often by bands with a cult following. The typical Sordide Sentimental release would be a 7-inch single in a numbered edition, packaged in an A4-sized sleeve with inserts and an idiosyncratic essay by Monsieur Turmel. Licht Und Blindheit, as the Atmosphere single was called, sold out immediately, and since 1980 has been one of the most collectible (and costly) releases of the era: the cheapest of two copies currently for sale at Discogs is over £1,500. (Many bootleg copies also exist: beware.)

As to the Licht Und Blindheit packaging, the cover collage was by Jean-Pierre Turmel while the enigmatic painting on the back turns out to be an untitled work by Jean-François Jamoul (1925–2002), not Caspar David Friedrich as my friend suspected, although it is very Friedrich-like. Jamoul was evidently a friend of Turmel who used more of his paintings on other Sordide Sentimental releases. During the 1970s Jamoul had been a regular contributor to French SF magazines, both as cover artist and essayist. In 2006 Sordide Sentimental released Temps Incertains, a DVD/book devoted to Jamoul’s art and writings.

Rite de Passage (1968) by Alexei Panshin.

It’s interesting looking at some of Jamoul’s other art in light of all this: one painting on the cover of Galaxie magazine looks distinctly Lovecraftian while another piece was used by a publication named Nyarlathotep. Back in 2008 journalist Jon Savage was corresponding with my colleagues at Savoy Books prior to writing a piece for the Guardian about Ian Curtis’s reading material. (The Savoy bookshops in Manchester during the 1970s and 80s were notable for their comprehensive stock of Burroughs, Ballard and other essential material.) One of the questions was whether Curtis had read (or bought) any HP Lovecraft, something that neither Dave nor Mike could answer. These French magazines at least show one very tenuous connection (which Curtis wouldn’t have known about, of course) via Jamoul’s paintings. Savage’s Guardian piece has since been expanded into an introduction for the recent Faber book of Ian Curtis lyrics; HP Lovecraft receives a passing mention there during discussion of Licht Und Blindheit‘s B-side, Dead Souls.

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Weekend links 236

The Three Witches (2014) by Lorena Carvalho.

• Immersion, a new album by Grey Frequency, “…is a recording of the broken signals, wraiths in the ether from lost futures and utopias which were once promised…”. Box Of Secrets (1999) is an album of electronica by Ian Boddy that’s a free download until the end of December.

• “Hothouse flowers, Egyptian statuary, jewels, Nubian servants, crystal balls, cocaine, opium and champagne were just some of the things she spent her money on…” Lucy Davies explores the riotous world of Marchesa Luisa Casati.

• “London is a network of complete nexuses, coincidences, overlaps, references…” Stephanie Boland talks to Iain Sinclair about his new book 70×70: Unlicensed Preaching: A Life Unpacked in 70 Films.

My Women’s Studies professors would say: “You don’t know how hard we fought for you.” And yet, when they told me my sexuality was not correct, I felt embarrassed. I knew I had longings that didn’t line up with the politics, but I refused to repress them, particularly in my writing. I fought to unravel a political correctness that was censoring desire.

Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson on sex, cinema and secrets

• Cthulhu, Fiction and Real Magic, a lecture by Ian ‘Cat’ Vincent at Treadwell’s, London, on December 3rd. For those who can’t attend, Erik Davis has just posted his essay about Lovecraft and contemporary occultism.

• “John Gielgud was obsessed with trousers, loved corduroy and leather. And so he wrote a film set in a menswear shop.” Gielgud’s unfilmed screenplay for gay porn director Peter de Rome may now be filmed.

• “The stories are even more fantastic and full of marvels than those in the Arabian Nights.” Robert Irwin on the newly-translated Tales of the Marvellous.

• Mixes of the week: The Advisory Circle present Winter From Out Here; Fall by The Ephemeral Man; Secret Thirteen Mix 136 by Cosmin TRG.

• Danny Cooke‘s drone views of Pripyat, Chernobyl. Related: Into the Zone: Gasworks Park (Seattle, WA) by Christina Scholz.

• Watch Dragnet’s 1967 LSD episode. More psychedelics: “Magic mushrooms change brain connections“.

• Earth Magic: Peter Bebergal on photography of witches at play and at ritual.

• Düsseldorf 1970: The crucible of Krautrock by those who were there.

• It’s Alright Ma, It’s Only Witchcraft (1968) by Fairport Convention | Witch’s Will (1973) by Wilburn Burchette | Witches’ Multiplication Table (1982) by Holger Czukay