Category: {art}

Art

Odes and Sonnets by Clark Ashton Smith

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Clark Ashton Smith’s weird fiction is reprinted more often and more widely than his poetry so it’s convenient for those curious about his verse that the Internet Archive has two volumes of early work. Odes and Sonnets is from 1918 and features embellishments by illustrator Florence Lundborg whose grape-devouring peacocks nod towards the fin de siècle spirit Smith was trying to capture in his poems. The Star-Treader, and Other Poems is Smith’s first book from 1912, published when he was just 19, and is heavily indebted to the Decadents. That Decadent influence carried over into the stories he wrote for Weird Tales and augments their unique flavour and over-heated atmosphere, an atmosphere which raised his work above the often mediocre level of his contemporaries. On page 58 of The Star-Treader can be found The Eldritch Dark, the poem from which the leading Smith website takes its name.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

Weekend links 16

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Sumer Is Icumen In but you wouldn’t have known it today, it being cold and wet, O my brothers. The picture above is the work of David Owen whose Ink Corporation does a splendid job of updating the iconography of the folk music world. Via Electric Eden.

• Biting the hand that feeds: designer Jonathan Barnbrook’s contribution to the Biennale of Sydney takes a dig at the whole enterprise. The art market is impervious to criticism (or shame) but the gesture is an amusing one.

• Emanuel Schongut’s book covers of the 1960s and 1970s on the artist’s own Flickr pages. Via A Journey Round My Skull.

• Owen Freeman on illustrating William Burroughs. Related: Reality Studio interviews Victor Bockris.

• RIP Jack Birkett, Derek Jarman’s Caliban and the Pope in Caravaggio. And RIP Dennis Hopper, actor, director and photographer.

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“Sea Nettle” (1873), a costume design by the Mistick Krewe of Comus. From this BibliOdyssey posting of New Orleans Mardi Gras designs.

• Chris Summerfield’s surfer boys at Lulu.

• Homotography also has a Tumblr page.

• The Ghost Box Study Series Singles.

• More 3D projection on buildings.

• John Foxx interviewed at FACT.

Song of the week: Ineffect (1989) by Material.

The Sapphire Museum of Magic and Occultism

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Cover design by Pamela Colman Smith for The Tarot of the Bohemians by “Papus” aka Gérard Encausse (1910).

The Sapphire Museum of Magic and Occultism says it’s been around since 1999 but I don’t recall having come across it before. Among a variety of fascinating rarities is this gallery section devoted to some of the less well-known illustrators of occult or occult-related books from the late 19th and early 20th century. Included there are two substantial galleries of work by Pamela Colman Smith, artist of the world’s most popular Tarot deck. Many of the scans are high-quality and, like the pictures at Golden Age Comic Book Stories, seem to be taken from the original printings. A great site.

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top left: WT Horton; top right: Cecil French.
bottom left: Althea Gyles; bottom right: M Bergson MacGregor.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Pamela Colman Smith’s Russian Ballet
• The art of Julien Champagne, 1877–1932
• The art of Pamela Colman Smith, 1878–1951
• The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Austin Osman Spare