{art} – Page 398 – { feuilleton }

Cthulhoid and Artflakes

Cthulhoid (2012).

Hot on the scaly heels of my recent Cthulhu God comes a new collage work I was messing with over Christmas. This was done in part as a reaction to the earlier picture which I’m very happy with but which looks cleaner and flatter than I prefer for Lovecraft-related things. I’d also found some new books of copyright-free cephalopoda that I wanted to try playing with. There are trace elements here of Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur but I’ve plundered Haeckel so much in the past it’s better to search elsewhere for source material.

I’ve been selling reproductions of works such as this at CafePress but now have an additional outlet with a new print venture, Artflakes, who asked me late last year to contribute to their site. Artflakes is a German company operating as CafePress does: artists upload their pictures which can then be sold on a variety of products. The product range is smaller than their rivals but they do canvas prints which CafePress don’t. These are costly items but canvas prints tend to be expensive anyway, even at a high street copy shop. On the plus side, being based in Germany means the shipping costs will be slightly cheaper inside Europe. I’ve not uploaded much at the moment but this new piece is there together with six other works. More will be added in the next couple of months.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Elie Grekoff’s Tirésias

Elie Grekoff (1914–1985) is the illustrator, a Russian-born French artist. Tirésias (1954) is a short work of homoerotica originally published anonymously in an edition of 150. The Grekoff website describes the volume (via Babel Fish) thusly:

One of the most beautiful text of the homosexual literature, a work which circulated under the coat, and which was condemned by the courts in 1964 and which make also this work an extremely rare publication. Publication of 92 pages.

The author, Marcel Jouhandeau (1888–1979), apparently spent much of his life oscillating between licentiousness and guilt thanks to his Catholicism but nevertheless managed to produce an acclaimed piece of gay fiction. Us Anglophones have to take the acclaim on faith, however, since the story doesn’t yet appear to have been translated into English. Given the increasing interest in gay fiction past and present this is a surprising oversight but we can still appreciate Grekoff’s illustrations, a rather fine series of fifteen wood engravings. There was also an additional run of fifteen copies of the book containing five “refusées” prints.

Grekoff illustrated a variety of novels and poetry in different styles. His work for Tirésias is reminiscent of Jean Cocteau’s in its outline figures and especially the stars for nipples, the star being a recurrent Cocteau motif. Jouhandeau’s wife, Élisabeth Toulemont, was a friend of Cocteau’s so this may have been deliberate although it’s hard to tell either way given the scarcity of information.

The excellent Bibliothèque Gay should be commended for making these rare illustrations public. See the complete set here. At the same site recently was a substantial post about Jean Cocteau’s Le livre blanc (1930).

Continue reading “Elie Grekoff’s Tirésias”

Weekend links 90

Portrait of Dr. Ignacio Chavez (1957) by Remedios Varo (1908–1963) some of whose Surrealist paintings can be seen at Frey Norris, San Francisco, from 19th January. There’s also In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 29th January.

The current crop of Republicans jostling for the Presidential nomination have reminded me of the Downunder people in Harlan Ellison’s post-apocalypse novella A Boy and His Dog (1969): a retrograde, fear-ridden community who send troublesome individuals to be exterminated at “the farm”. Rick Santorum (unforgettably pictured here with family in 2006 after losing an election) almost received the majority of Iowa’s votes for his nomination last week, prompting renewed scrutiny of his negative views about gay people, sexually active people, foreign people (especially Arabs and Mexicans), and anyone generally who isn’t a white, Catholic, Downunder person. Santorum is against gay marriage, of course—it’s hard to find a Republican who isn’t—but he also wants to ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and given the opportunity would allow US states to prevent any use of contraception. Add to this his pro-torture stance (which offends current Catholic church policy), and his willingness to wage war with Iran, and it’s easy to see why his name prompts reactions such as this:

I have a history with Rick Santorum. In 2003, when Santorum, in an interview with the Associated Press, first compared gay relationships to child rape and dog fucking (have I mentioned that Santorum has compared gay relationships to child rape and dog fucking?), I held a contest to redefine Santorum‘s last name. The winning definition: “the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.” (“Sometimes” is the most important word in the new definition of santorum; if you’re doing anal sex correctly, there won’t be any santorum – lower- or upper-case.) And since 2003, the new definition has been the No. 1 Google return when you search “santorum“.

Rick Santorum’s homophobic frothing by Dan Savage

Related: Santorum was named one of the three “most corrupt” Senators in 2006 | “Homohater fosser fram” which is how Dagbladet, Norway’s second largest tabloid newspaper, introduces Santorum to its readers | “Rick Santorum channels Saint Augustine” an article at Slate exploring the Handmaid’s Tale extent of Santorum‘s attitudes towards sex and morality | Rick Santorum quotes as New Yorker cartoons.

The Rod (1973) by Brigid Marlin.

• Ballardian posts a long-overdue interview with Brigid Marlin, famous now for having brought two lost Paul Delvaux paintings back to life for JG Ballard, but also a woman with an extensive career as a fantastic artist using Ernst Fuchs‘s laborious mische painting technique.

• Quentin Blake on Ronald Searle, in which Blake notes that his hero was given a full-scale exhibition of his work at the Bibliothèque Nationale, France, in 1973 whilst being ignored throughout his life by the major institutions in Britain.

• Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life by Alastair Brotchie is reviewed by Michael Moorcock who tells me the Guardian cut out his references to Boris Vian, Maurice Richardson and David Britton.

• Ian McKellen stirs things up by suggesting (not for the first time) that Shakespeare was bisexual.

• Ten posters by Only More Never Less inspired by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

• An end to bad heir days: The posthumous power of the literary estate.

• Peace Eye! Fug! A Long Talk With Ed Sanders.

• Sand sculptures by Carl Jara.

• Letterheady

• Skylab: These Are The Blues (1995) | Beyond The Breeze (1995) | Red Light, Blue Light (1995) | Indigo (Sabres of Paradise remix, 1995) | Seashell (Nobukazu Takemura mix, 1995).

Vaslav Nijinsky by Paul Iribe

Another small and obscure volume hiding in the Internet Archive, Vaslav Nijinsky is a portfolio of six ink drawings by Paul Iribe (1883–1935) with a few lines of appended verse by Jean Cocteau. Iribe was a French designer and fashion illustrator who for a while was a member of the Ballets Russes circle, hence these depictions of the troupe’s most celebrated dancer. As post-Beardsley black-and-whites go these are pretty good although Iribe’s figures lack the requisite grace for their subject. If they were the only drawings of their kind that wouldn’t be so bad but one of Iribe’s contemporaries, George Barbier, produced his own superb series of Nijinsky drawings most of which can be seen here.

Note: the date given for this book at the Internet Archive is 1900 which seems quite wrong given that Nijinsky was still a young dancer in Russia at that time. Iribe’s drawings must date at least from 1910, maybe later.

Continue reading “Vaslav Nijinsky by Paul Iribe”

Albert Bierstadt in Yosemite

Sunset in the Yosemite Valley (c. 1868).

After yesterday’s photos of the Yosemite Valley I have to follow up with paintings of the region by Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), a German immigrant whose landscape art is connected to the Hudson River School although much of his work concerned views of California and the Rocky Mountains. Some of the paintings apparently received criticism for their deliberately Romantic approach to landscape, especially the John Martin-like blazing sunsets. All the pictures here date from the same period that Carelton Watkins was taking his celebrated photos of the area (which makes me wonder whether artist and photographer ever met) so complaints about lack of realism would seem somewhat redundant.

Wikimedia Commons has a substantial collection of Bierstadt’s paintings.

Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California (1865).

The Domes of the Yosemite (1867).

Cathedral Rocks, A Yosemite View (1872).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Carleton Watkins in Yosemite
• Two American paintings