{art} – Page 509 – { feuilleton }

Art Nouveau Revival 1900 . 1933 . 1966 . 1974

It was the slightly gamy residue of the super-elegant and exotic pictures of Aubrey Beardsley. I have always considered the 1900 period as the psycho-analytical end-product of the Greco-Roman Decadence. I said to myself: Since these people will not hear of aesthetics and are capable of becoming excited only over “vital agitations”, I shall show them how in the tiniest ornamental detail of an object of 1900 there is more mystery, more poetry, more eroticism, more madness, perversity, torment, pathos, grandeur and biological depth than in their innumerable stock of ugly fetishes, possessing bodies and souls of a stupidity that is simply and uniquely savage!

Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942).

More from Paris, whereupon it becomes necessary to ask: how much more groovy could this poster be? And the answer is none. None more groovy. Art Nouveau Revival 1900 • 1933 • 1966 • 1974 is an exhibition running at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, which traces the echoes of Art Nouveau through Surrealism into the revival of the 1960s.

Poster by Albert Angus Turbayne for Macmillan’s illustrated Standard Novels (1903).

Rejected and scorned in the decades following its brief flowering, Art Nouveau was spectacularly rehabilitated in the 1960s. This re-evaluation offers a particularly interesting interlude in the history of style in that many different areas were affected at the same time by this phenomenon: the history of art, the art market, contemporary creative work, particularly design and graphics.

There’s further detail here, along with photos of some of the exhibits. Verner Panton’s Visiona II makes another appearance and in addition to Dalí and company there’s the magic word “psychedelic”. The exhibition runs until February 4, 2010, and there’s a catalogue co-written by the V&A’s fin de siècle expert Stephen Calloway which I’m going to have to buy. Via.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Beardsley at the V&A
• Michael English, 1941–2009
• Temples for Future Religions by François Garas
• Antonin Mercié’s David
• Art Nouveau illustration
• Dirty Dalí
• Verner Panton’s Visiona II
• Flowers of Love

Want to know what the 60s were like? Then look at Martin Sharp’s work

More book covers

One of my Cthulhu portraits as it appears in Image Swirl, a new Google feature-in-search-of-a-purpose. Yes, I own a portion of the Googleverse, or the Googleverse owns a portion of me; the latter seems more likely. As well as being the cover of my Lovecraft volume, that picture appeared earlier this year on a reprint of The Call of Cthulhu from Barnes & Noble.

While we’re on the subject—and book covers are never far away, as yesterday’s post demonstrates—I was asked to contribute to this week’s Mind Meld discussion at SF Signal, answering the question “Which are the most memorable book covers in science fiction and fantasy?” Some of the entries in my list have been discussed here in the past. Compared to the other responses I come across like I’m giving a lecture… And there was further sf cover discussion at io9 this week. Good to see older generations of artists and designers still receiving enthusiastic attention.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Science fiction and fantasy covers

Wildeana

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1907).

I finished reading Neil McKenna’s excellent biography recently, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, a book which makes an ideal companion to Richard Ellmann’s 1987 life of Wilde. Whilst reading about the two trials I remembered that among five pages of digitised Wilde volumes at the Internet Archive there’s a 1906 book, The Trial of Oscar Wilde: From the Shorthand Reports whose contents are what you’d expect from the title. Browsing through the other files there revealed further items of note such as this edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol published a year later and illustrated throughout by J Latimer Wilson. The page layout of text plus a narrow picture is uncommon, and from the date of publication it’s interesting to see that despite Wilde’s shattered reputation there was still money to be made printing his books.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1907).

Among the other volumes are two finely illustrated editions of his short stories. The edition of A House of Pomegranates below comes with drawings by Ben Kutcher, an artist about whom I know nothing other than his style is very similar to that of the great Harry Clarke. The introduction is a surprise, a serious appraisal of Wilde’s life by HL Mencken who admired the way the author stood against the prevailing morality of the day. There’s also an edition of The Happy Prince and Other Tales from 1920 illustrated by Charles Robinson.

The House of Pomegranates (1918).

These books are mainly of note for their decoration, however. Of more interest to Wilde enthusiasts is a first edition of Robert Hichens’ The Green Carnation from 1894. Hichens was a friend of Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas and, according to McKenna’s book, a fellow Uranian (ie: gay) who knew the pair well enough to be able to pen a scandalous roman à clef based on their relationship, helping to confirm for public opinion much that was suspected about Wilde’s outrageous lifestyle. Both Wilde and Douglas disowned Hichens and repudiated the novel but, coming a year before the Queensbury libel trial, it did neither of them any favours. Those curious to read the exploits of “Esmé Amarinth” and “Lord Reginald Hastings” may download a copy here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Lumiere at Durham

Durham Cathedral as it appeared this weekend as a part of the four-day Lumiere art event which illuminated the cathedral’s already spectacular location with projections and light installations. Flickr has a wide selection of photos documenting the various stages of the event.

The fluorescent bulbs on the banks of the Wear would have dazzled even Dan Flavin, the American founding father of light art. Durham’s river was a riot of neon and sci-fi lasers. What Flavin would make of this display is another matter. Light art has come a long way since the industrial minimalism that saw syncopations of strip bulbs arranged in white gallery spaces. Contemporary artists are using low-emission technology to produce site-specific work on a grand scale. Unlike the postwar modernists, their work has a social function: to transform cities. They are engineers of public space and sculptors of civic identity.

Durham’s Lumiere is part of a growing international movement. The organisers, Helen Marriage and Nicky Webb from the London-based events company Artichoke, loosely modelled the event on an annual Fête des Lumières in Lyon (5–8 December), a festival that hosts 80 light installations and attracts over 4 million tourists every year. (More.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tetragram for Enlargement
• Eno’s Luminous Opera House panorama
• The art of Rune Guneriussen
• Lightmark
• Giant Lantern Festival
• Maximum Silence by Giancarlo Neri
• Volume at the V&A