A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Art
A page from Une semaine de bonté (1934) by Max Ernst.
Dream of the Hungry Ghost (2003) by Colette Calascione.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Metamorphosis Victorianus
• Max (The Birdman) Ernst
• The Robing of the Birds
A picture for embittered lovers.
Among other things this week I’ve been working on the design for another CD featuring photos by Liz Eve, a photographer whose pictures are always a pleasure to use. (Our earlier encounters can be seen here, here and here.) The latest set have this anti-Valentine for an eye-popping cover image. I’ll be posting the finished layouts once everything is approved by the label.
• Crash: JG Ballard’s artistic legacy. Iain Sinclair on Ballard and a new art exhibition inspired by the author’s fiction.
• More art: Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ Artlog is essential reading. Lots of insights into his beautiful work.
• Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges will be released in an expanded edition on April 27th with outtakes, documentary, book and other extras.
• Sonic Youth dude and fellow Arthurian Thurston Moore has a blog.
• “That’s all it comes down to in the end, though, isn’t it? Put it in and jiggle it about a bit.” Alan Bennett & John Fortune discuss sex. A hoot.
• “I wanna walk through Sodom with a boy on my arm / Who’s so damn pretty I don’t know where I am…” A song from 1984 for Valentine’s Day: I, Bloodbrother Be (£4,000 Love Letter) by Shock Headed Peters.
Francis Bacon’s private wrestling sessions | Previously unseen images of wrestlers made in Bacon’s studio demonstrate the artist’s love of the visceral.
Ed Jansen writes again to notify me that the latest number of his web magazine, Passage, is now online, about which he says:
In Passage nr. 12 there are articles about a 17th century garden in The Hague, about the mysterious visit to The Hague by the Comte De Saint Germain. Was he really a enlightened man or a fraud? If you’re an occultist you’ll tend to believe the first, the historian thinks otherwise. Then there are the photos of the dancer and performer Hiroake Umeda. Strange movements underlined by light-effects. Living in a Capsule is a combination of the paintings by the Dutch artist Tjebbe Beekman and the work of J.G. Ballard. Lastly there is an article about Jan Bastiaans, the doctor who experimented with LSD to ‘free’ the victims of the concentration camps of the nightmares and repressed memories.
Once again the text content is in Dutch but that doesn’t exclude all visitors here. I hadn’t come across the work of Tjebbe Beekman before. His paintings of urban desolation are indeed a good match for one aspect of Ballard’s work, and they make an interesting contrast with Dick French’s earlier views of the author’s Drowned World.
Trust by Tjebbe Beekman (2005).
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Drowned Worlds
• Passage 11
• Passage 10
The boundless depths of Chris Mullen’s VTS site continue to yield treasures. The documentation for these pictures is somewhat vague but they seem to be illustrations for Fantômas stories which Mullen has grouped under the title The Dark Ledger, part of a larger selection of pages devoted to the Lord of Evil. The depiction of the Eiffel Tower is of interest here for its showing a view over one of the Paris expositions, possibly the Exposition Universelle of 1900. The opium den, on the other hand, seems remarkably overlit and well-appointed compared to the more customary renderings of such places.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exposition Universelle publications
• Exposition cornucopia
• Return to the Exposition Universelle
• The Palais Lumineux
• Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
• Exposition Universelle, 1900
• The Palais du Trocadéro
• The Evanescent City
• Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
• Fantômas