{art} – Page 539 – { feuilleton }

The Evanescent City

The cover of The Evanescent City shows a night view of Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts, one of the few remaining structures from the Panama-Pacific International Exposition that was held in San Francisco in 1915. After earlier posts about ephemeral architecture and the futuristic visions of Hugh Ferriss, I stumbled across the Books about California site which features a wealth of scanned volumes, including a number of books and pamphlets devoted to the Panama-Pacific Exposition. Expositions and World’s Fairs hold a particular attraction for enthusiasts of architectural invention, not least for the way they allow architects the opportunity to create structures that would otherwise never be built.

Palace of Horticulture—Dome and Spires by Night from The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition.

At night, when the powerful searchlights within the dome are played upon the translucent glass, the effect is magical, the reflections weirdly changing in color and shape. The rich details of the decorations are softened in the night light.

The Panama-Pacific Exposition and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago fascinate owing to the insight they give into the 19th- and early-20th century architectural imagination. This invariably meant huge towers, enormous domes and everything ladled with elaborate decoration, the Panama-Pacific Exposition being especially decadent in this respect, numbering a jewel-spangled tower among its attractions. With the Bauhaus innovations a few years away this was the last time the world would be offered a reflection of itself that was so excessively indebted to the past. If Hugh Ferriss shows us a vision of the world like that in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the Panama-Pacific architects invite us to imagine a world like the Slumberland that Winsor McCay created for Little Nemo.

The Internet Archive has a number of short films showing views of the exposition. Most interesting, if rather crudely made, is The Story of the Jewel City, a brief fantasy about two children exploring the exposition grounds.

The following pictures are a small sample of the amount of material at Books about California. The snake-entwined figure of Helios would have made a good addition to the Men with snakes post while it’s difficult not to smile at the suggestion that the figure of a naked man should be preserved for America’s future gay capital.

Tower of Jewels—the Illumination by Night from The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition.

The Tower takes its name from the thousands of many-colored jewels so cut, polished and suspended that they reflect the sunshine with dazzling brilliancy by day and at night, under the white radiance of the searchlights, clothe the whole structure with shimmering splendor.

The Fountain of Earth from The Court of Ages by Beatrice Wright.

Part of Education Building and Court of Palms looking towards Horticultural Building from Panama-Pacific International Exposition—Popular Information.

Tower and Cascade in Court of Abundance from the Official View Book of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

Dedicated to Music and Pageantry. Water in the cascade flows over a scheme of brilliant illumination. Designed by Louis Christian Mullgardt.

Palace of Horticulture—The Dome and East Entrance from The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition.

Helios by Robert I Aitken from The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition.

The Rising Sun by Adolph Alexander Weinman from Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts by Juliet Helena Lumbard James.

This fresh, strong young Sun is about to start on his journey – dawn is soon to break upon the world. With muscles stretched, the wind blowing through his hair, the heavenly joy of the first move expressed upon his face, the vigor of young life pulsating through his body, he will start the chest forward and move those outstretched wings. Let us preserve this glorious figure for our western city. It would so admirably suggest the new light that has been shed upon San Francisco by the Exposition of nineteen hundred and fifteen, as well as the new light occasioned by the opening of the Panama Canal.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ephemeral architecture
• Hugh Ferriss and The Metropolis of Tomorrow
• Winsor McCay’s Hippodrome souvenirs
• The World in 2030
• Metropolis posters
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s future city

The art of Oliver Vernon

Sidewinder (2007).

Promised Land (2007).

Unity mural (2002).

• Official site

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Paisley patterns
• Flowers of Love

Hadrian and Greek love

Hadrian: Empire and Conflict is an exhibition based around the life of the Roman emperor which opens at the British Museum on 24 July and runs until 26 October, 2008.

This special exhibition will explore the life, love and legacy of Rome’s most enigmatic emperor, Hadrian (reigned AD 117–138).

Ruling an empire that comprised much of Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East, Hadrian was a capable and, at times, ruthless military leader. He realigned borders and quashed revolt, stabilising a territory critically overstretched by his predecessor, Trajan.

Hadrian had a great passion for architecture and Greek culture. His extensive building programme included the Pantheon in Rome, his villa in Tivoli and the city of Antinopolis, which he founded and named after his male lover Antinous.

This unprecedented exhibition will provide fresh insight into the sharp contradictions of Hadrian’s character and challenges faced during his reign.

Objects from 31 museums worldwide and finds from recent excavations will be shown together for the first time to reassess his legacy, which remains strikingly relevant today.

The Henry Moore Institute had an exhibition devoted to Hadrian’s lover Antinous last year. This week The Independent was looking at their relationship in light of the exhibition announcement, probably the most celebrated gay relationship in the ancient world.

Several of the artefacts (in the exhibition) relate to his male consort, Antinous, who accompanied him on his travels around the empire. These items include a poem written on papyrus, featuring the two men hunting together, and new finds that include memorials to the dead lover at Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli.

Although it was not uncommon for his predecessors to have taken gay lovers alongside a female spouse, Hadrian was unique in making his love “official” in a way that no other emperor had before him.

Ruined Gallery of the Villa Adriana at Tivoli.

I managed to see Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli when I visited Rome, a very well-preserved estate. One of my favourite places in the city, partly as a result of Piranesi’s drawings of the place, was the Castel Sant’Angelo which was built on the site of Hadrian’s Mausoleum. Piranesi also produced some renderings of the villa, including this splendid view of the ruined statue gallery.

And while we’re on the subject of antique sexuality, the provocative Greek sculpture known as the Barberini Faun appears in cropped form on the cover of a new book about homophilia in Ancient Greece, The Greeks and Greek Love by James Davidson. Davidson’s book looks like a fascinating work if this Guardian article on the subject is anything to go by, and a welcome tonic in the light of Frank Miller’s recent fabulations in 300.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Cult of Antinous

Witness my hand and official seal

Anxious purchasers of the lavish Lovecraft art book from Centipede Press may like to know that the European signing sheets have arrived here safely ready to be scrawled upon by yours truly. I was surprised to find that these are big pages which means this book is going to be a real monster in all senses of the word, and certainly worth every dollar of its considerable cost. And I was pleased to find myself listed on the same sheet as the great Ian Miller, an artist I had the pleasure of meeting some years ago and whose Lovecraft covers for the Panther Horror series in the Seventies went some way to inspiring my own efforts a few years later.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s still a lot more sheets to sign…

Dirty Dalí

The paranoiac-critical gaze: Dirty Dalí.

I finally managed to see this fascinating documentary this week. Since my TV broke down some time ago I refused to waste money buying another, partly for the reason that films such as this are increasingly rare and most of them have been shunted to minority channel BBC 4 which I can’t receive. Thanks to BitTorrent you can still find the worthwhile stuff, of course, but this often requires patience.

The Wines of Gala and of God (1977).

Dirty Dalí: A Private View was a reminiscence by art critic Brian Sewell about his encounters with Dalí and wife Gala at their home in Port Lligat in the late 60s and early 70s. What’s interesting about it is the first-hand light it throws on Dalí’s complicated sexuality, a subject which has been the source of speculation in biographies (notably Ian Gibson’s The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí) but which is confused by the artist’s simultaneous revealing of his obsessions in his art and the veiling of his interests in public statements, not least the frequent declarations of impotence. Sewell confirms that Dalí was interested in both men and women although purely as a voyeur, and relates how his first encounter with the artist led to his having to lie naked in the armpit of a giant Christ sculpture in Dalí’s garden, masturbating while Dalí took photographs. Sewell also examines Dalí’s affair with Federico García Lorca, the closest the artist came to a gay romance, and his subsequent relationship with Gala, which became one where the pair used the artist’s celebrity to attract delectable people of both sexes, like a pair of art world super-swingers. According to Sewell, Dalí’s physical ideal was the hermaphrodite which would possibly explain his attraction to (alleged) transsexual Amanda Lear during this time.

The Great Masturbator (1929).

As a piece of television the film struggles to fill out its running time by resorting to animating photographs, a persistent hazard for documentaries that lack the relevant raw material. All the footage of Dalí is lifted from previous documentary films including a large chunk of Russell Harty’s Aquarius interview, Hello Dali! (that camp double-entendre now seems very apt), from 1973. The overall effect of Sewell’s narrative is to add to Dalí’s already considerable feet of clay but that’s the inevitable outcome of nearly any biography; real lives are always messy. Sewell nonetheless ends by reaffirming Dalí’s principal importance as one of the great painters of the 20th century and, in an interesting side note, declares him to be the last great painter of a religious work with his Christ of St John of the Cross. A great religious artist and also one who produced hundreds of pornographic drawings, some of which are seen in the film. In art, as in the life, the contradictions are everywhere.

• Dirty Dalí at Grey Lodge
• Homage to Catalonia: Robert Hughes on Dalí

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
• Dalí and Film
• Ballard on Dalí
• Fantastic art from Pan Books
• Penguin Surrealism
• The Surrealist Revolution
• The persistence of DNA
• Salvador Dalí’s apocalyptic happening
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• Dalí Atomicus
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie