{painting} – Page 146 – { feuilleton }

Mossa’s Salomés

Salomé (1901).

Monsieur Wiley prompted this post by drawing my attention to the picture above. I’d already seen another Salomé by Gustav Adolf Mossa on this page a few days ago but resisted the temptation to mention it. A bit more searching revealed yet another Mossa rendering of the theme which perhaps isn’t so surprising given the artist’s obsession with lethal women. The first exceeds all previous depictions of the Biblical temptress by having her actually licking blood from the executioner’s sword. In the third picture she’s content merely to use a severed hand as a page-turner while John the Baptist’s mutilated body is carted away by servants.

The search for pictures turned up a blog I hadn’t seen before, Women in the Bible (“This is no religious blog!”), which has several Salomé postings. And there’s also Les voiles de Salomé: Labyrinthique errance, virevoltes et volutes.

Encor Salomé (1905).

Salomé (1908).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive

The art of Gustav Adolf Mossa, 1883–1971

Self-portrait.

A French artist and another late Symbolist painter whose idiosyncracies point to Surrealism but whose obsession with femmes fatales looks back to the preoccupations of the fin de siècle. If you don’t mind the implicit misogyny there’s a lot more to be seen here and here.

Elle (1906).

Le baiser d’Hélène (1905).

Bruges-la-morte (1911).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le Sphinx Mystérieux
• La belle sans nom
• The Feminine Sphinx
• Le Monstre
• Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal
• Empusa
• Bruges-la-Morte

The art of Carel Willink, 1900–1983

Townscape (1934).

Carel Willink was a Dutch painter whose self-described brand of “imaginary realism” conjured in its early years a collection of views of desolate plazas, empty lanes and abandoned ruins over which smoke or cloud hangs like an ominous portent. The works of Giorgio de Chirico and Paul Delvaux come to mind when looking at these pictures although Willink’s work has enough unique qualities to stand apart from his more famous contemporaries. I’m also reminded a little of Spanish artist Arnau Alemany who has a similar predilection for isolated architecture.

Chateau in Spain (1939).

There’s an official Willink website here, while further paintings can be seen at this Flickr set and also at Ten Dreams.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bruges-la-Morte
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
• The art of Arnau Alemany

Weekend links 42

Blasphemous Rumours (2009/2010) by Ryan Martin. The artist now has a dedicated site for his paintings.

• The Museum of Censored Art, a mobile gallery, will be showing the withdrawn David Wojnarowicz film outside the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, until their contentious gay art exhibition closes next month. Related: Bishop of Mallorca criticises calendar—which shows Catholic youths posing naked—for ‘not respecting Christian symbols’.

• Didier Lestrade published French gay zine Magazine in the 1980s, and later co-founded Têtu. He’s interviewed at BUTT and has started uploading the entire run of Magazine about which he says: “I don’t want to stamp some kind of logo on this material. It’s gay. It’s gay history. It belongs to everybody. If you want to take a piece of it, please try to mention the origins of it, a simple code word “Magazine” will be enough. If you wanna be more specific, be my guest.”

• HMV, Britain’s last big music chain, is closing 60 branches. Yet a new wave of CD stores is thriving. Oh, HMV, how I’ll miss your £17 CDs (and double-CDs at £34)… On second thoughts, no I won’t, your wretched retail barns always exemplified the greed endemic in the music business.

Love Comes/Destroyer by Stephen Kasner.

• Artist Stephen Kasner‘s work has adorned music releases by Sunn O))), Isis and others. He’s currently another American creator in need of assistance with medical expenses. Details here.

• The Ghosts of Old London: the gloomy Victorian metropolis in all its deteriorated splendour. See also: In Search of Relics of Old London.

• “It’s time to recognise [Sandy] Denny as not simply a folksinger but one of Britain’s great poets of song,” says Rob Young.

• Louis Pattison talks to Locrian about JG Ballard, old VHS tapes and their new album The Crystal World.

• The Dreams That Stuff Is Made Of: Lebbeus Woods’ big drawings.

• Hannes Bok portfolios at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• An Iranian rapper named Salome. Also here and here.

• A Moment of (Alan) Moore.

• RIP Mick Karn.

• Book Worship.

• Sons of Pioneers (1981) by Japan; Tao-Tao (1982) by Masami Tsuchiya; Glow World (1983) by Bill Nelson.

Gervase and Patrick

Gervase (left) & Patrick Procktor (right).

Once upon a time in the 1960s: painter Patrick Procktor and friend photographed by Cecil Beaton at Beaton’s home; no wonder David Hockney used to come and visit. Procktor made Gervase Griffiths the subject of his work on more than one occasion, see here and here. Thanks to Little Augury for the picture details.

Update: For more about Procktor, see Patrick Procktor: Art and Life (2010) by Ian Massey.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Further back and faster