{art} – Page 511 – { feuilleton }

Two steps forward, one step back

My apologies to any visitors arriving here during the past week to find the site down. What should have been a straightforward upgrading of the hosting service became overly-extended due to compounded misunderstanding and poor communication. It didn’t help that I was also extremely busy catching up with work after the long bank holiday weekend.

By way of catching up with the posting, anyone interested in Francis Bacon’s art is advised to go and read this excellent appraisal by my favourite art critic, Robert Hughes, a taster for the forthcoming Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain. The exhibition will run from 11 September, 2008 to 4 January, 2009.

Willy Pogány’s Parsifal

Bewilderèd Stood Parsifal.

One of a set of illustrations by Willy Pogány (1882–1955) for Parsifal, or the Legend of the Holy Grail retold from Ancient Sources by TW Rolleston (1912) at the Camelot Project. Lots of other classic illustrators represented there including some I hadn’t come across before. Rolleston’s book featured many colour plates but I tend to prefer Pogány’s very fine line drawings for this particular work. The indefatigable Bud Plant has a two-part Pogány biography which shows the artist’s versatility.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Thomas Paul’s sealife

Thomas Paul’s melamine plates parallel Laura Zindel’s ceramics in their borrowing of natural history engravings. Anything which brings tentacles into home furnishing gets a vote here and the octopus design at the top right can also be found on Paul’s cushion designs. Jeff VanderMeer would probably bemoan the absence of the squid but I took care of that department last year.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Rune Olsen
• Laura Zindel’s ceramics
• Octopulps
• New things for April II
• Darwin Day
• The glass menagerie

Wood that Works by David C Roy

Falcon (2007).

David C Roy‘s wooden sculptures are fine enough when viewed like this but really need to be seen in motion since these are all kinetic pieces. Roy’s website has a choice of animations for each work, from Flash diagrams to YouTube videos, all of which are fascinating to look at. Each piece is spring-driven and runs for several hours. The movements aren’t as predictable as you’d imagine either, many of them create an evolving range of patterns depending on the speed or arrangement of the components.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Glass engines and marble machines
• Peter Eudenbach’s Eiffel Ferris wheel

The art of Mahlon Blaine, 1894–1969

Nova Venus (1938).

I doubt that illustrator Mahlon Blaine featured in any of the scurrilous porn books in Franz Kafka’s collection—he would have been too young, for a start—but his erotic work isn’t so far removed from some of the artists of The Amethyst and Opals. As usual with obscure talents of this period it’s good to know that someone has already done the required legwork in assembling biographical details. The always reliable Bud Plant has a page about Mahlon Blaine’s life and work, and there’s also a website, The Outlandish Art of Mahlon Blaine. Blaine’s quality control is variable but there’s a trace of the usual suspects in many of these drawings, notably Harry Clarke and, occasionally, the etiolated shade of the Divine Aubrey. (Beardsley, to you.) Similarities too to contemporaries such as Wallace Smith and John Austen, both of whom owe a debt to Clarke and Beardsley. The drawing above comes from this gallery which is among the better sets available.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kafka’s porn unveiled