{art} – Page 66 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 689

Salammbô (1899) by Adolphe Cossard.

• At Unquiet Things: “A mystery that no longer exists: Wrinkle in Time cover artist revealed”. S. Elizabeth explains. I did a little research of my own into this enigma without success. Good to know that it’s been resolved.

• James Balmont’s latest guide to Japanese cinema is an examination of the transcendental oeuvre of Yasujiro Ozu.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Trains intersect with everyday life in nostalgic illustrations by Shinjiro Ogawa.

• DJ Food discovered a set of Zodiac posters by Bruce Krefting from 1969.

• At Wormwoodiana: John Howard on looking for misplaced Machens.

• At Vinyl Factory: Discovering Mort Garson with Hilary Wood.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: More Ozu in Yasujiro Ozu Day.

• New music: Multizonal Mindscramble by Polypores.

• Mix of the week is a mix for The Wire by Aho Ssan.

• Ioneye in conversation with Bill Laswell.

• Train Song (1969) by Pentangle | Love On A Real Train (1984) by Tangerine Dream | Tokyosaka Train (2002) by Funki Porcini

The sublimities of John Harris

I might never have paid much attention to John Harris’s paintings if they hadn’t appeared so often at Adam Rowe’s 70s Sci-fi Art. Harris is also featured in Rowe’s new book, Worlds Beyond Time, with a few examples that sent me looking for more. I like science-fiction art when it’s dealing with megastructures, especially if those structures aren’t readily interpretable as buildings, spaceships or alien artefacts. This is SF art in the service of the philosophical Sublime, a quality which, since the 1940s, you don’t find very much in painting outside the work of illustrators or artists of the fantastic. Some of these structures, like the one that Harris calls “The Wall” (below), might be relatives of the abandoned concrete edifices in Jean-Pierre Ugarte’s paintings. Another point in Harris’s favour is the way he uses SF-like imagery as outlets for his own visionary experiences: there’s a series entitled Mass which depicts images that came to him following a period of transcendental meditation. The Mass series later gave a title to the first book of Harris’s art which was published by Paper Tiger in 2000.

• More John Harris

Continue reading “The sublimities of John Harris”

Weekend links 688

Ascending to the Cathedral, Barcelona (1938/1960) by Kati Horna.

• The rise and fall of Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong’s infamous urban monolith. Related: a four-and-a-half-hour walkthrough of Stray, a game in which you help a cat escape from a deteriorated robot-filled housing complex.

• Quote of the week: “The true master requires the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” Thus Vladimir Nabokov at Lawrence Weschler’s Wondercabinet.

• New music: Orion Nebula by Christian Wittman, and Chthonic by Lawrence English & Lea Bertucci.

Chapter by chapter, Flaubert lampoons his poor pair, who fail at discipline after attempted discipline: landscape architecture, anatomy, history, literature, phrenology, religion, even love, and on and on. In each pursuit, they never lose the optimism or the hubris of thinking they can put their knowledge to work in the world. When they become interested in pedagogy, they adopt a pair of abandoned children who are at turns mystified by and contemptuous of their efforts to improve their well-being. The fruit trees fail, the novel is abandoned, a cat is boiled alive, the children cause scandals.

David Schurman Wallace explores the hazards of distraction with a detour through Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet

• At AnOther: Peter De Potter’s new book explores the erotic performance of social media.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Hobart LaRoche presents…15 experimental video games.

• Take a look at a book chronicling the albums of Island Records.

• At Colossal: Gabriel Schama’s laser-cut plywood reliefs.

• Orion (1986) by Metallica | Shades Of Orion (1993) by Shades Of Orion | Orion (2001) by Jah Wobble and Bill Laswell

Remedios Varo, 1967

Online galleries have made profiles like this short Mexican film rather redundant, but it’s good to know that someone went to the trouble of presenting Varo’s paintings in this way at a time (1967) when you’d be lucky to see more than one of them in a book on Surrealist art. Jomí García Ascot’s camera roams among the details of Varo’s dreamworlds while Spanish voices read from a variety of Romantic and other texts. I hadn’t noticed before the amount of cats in Varo’s paintings. Look for the felines here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Pynchon and Varo
• Remedios Varo’s recipe for erotic dreams

More Harry Clarke online

A while back I put together a list of links to freely-available online copies of Harry Clarke’s illustrated books. The list didn’t have any notable omissions but was unsatisfying if you’re like I am and prefer to see scans of an entire book rather than collections of pictures or home-made creations. This illustration of Ligeia is from a 1936 US edition of Clarke’s illustrated Poe which is archived in the digital collection at Poland’s Biblioteka Narodowa. This is the edition for which Clarke created eight new full-page pieces in colour, all of which are happily intact in the Polish copy which may be downloaded as a PDF. A good test of the scanning (and print) quality of this book is the illustration for The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, a drawing where Clarke tested the limits of ink reproduction with his closely-hatched lines and speckle effects. I was hoping the Polish library might have more books like this but so far nothing has appeared.

Following this discovery I tried another Clarke search at the Internet Archive where I found this recent upload of a Dutch edition of his illustrated Perrault. The same source has had an English edition of this title for some time but the copy is missing one of the colour plates, plate theft being a perennial problem for library books. Or even non-library books… I own a rather battered first-edition of Clarke’s illustrated Swinburne from which two of the full-page pictures have been carefully removed by a previous owner with a razor blade. And speaking of Swinburne, Clarke’s edition of the Selected Poems is the one I keep hoping to find as an online edition, together with his Faust, even though I own a reprint of the latter book. I suspect the contentious “obscene” drawings in these two volumes have kept copies away from library collections. You can at least find the illustrations for the books easily enough. Still unavailable unless you’re a collector of rare magazines is The Golden Hind, the short-lived arts magazine edited by Clifford Bax and Austin Osman Spare which contained unique contributions from Harry Clarke and many similar artists of the 1920s. That’s one I’ll continue to search for.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Harry Clarke online
• Harry Clarke record covers
• Thomas Bodkin on Harry Clarke
• Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art
• Harry Clarke and others in The Studio
• Harry Clarke’s Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
• Harry Clarke in colour
• The Tinderbox
• Harry Clarke and the Elixir of Life
• Cardwell Higgins versus Harry Clarke
• Modern book illustrators, 1914
• Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke
• Strangest Genius: The Stained Glass of Harry Clarke
• Harry Clarke’s stained glass
• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931