{painting} – Page 59 – { feuilleton }

The art of Manfred Sillner

Über Regensburg (1979–82).

Manfred Sillner is a German artist whose work had eluded me until very recently when curiosity about a print on the cover of an obscure album impelled me to search for the person responsible. Happily, Sillner has a website (many contemporary painters let galleries do the web work) which gives a decent overview of his prints, drawings and hyper-detailed paintings. The picture above has a page of its own with a number of detailed views. I’m not always keen on the work of artists pursuing what many people would consider as late Surrealism, it’s easy to stray into whimsy with this anything-goes approach. Sillner avoids this for the most part, and I like the concentration on architecture. Some of the prints on his website are small reproductions but larger copies may be found elsewhere.

Die Kirche von Villers-la-Ville (1987).

Das Selbstportrait (1996–97).

Hinter Traumvorhängen (1977–82).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

The art of Bolesław Biegas (1877–1954)

Univers de la tendresse (1918).

This Polish artist came to my attention recently while looking for something in a book about Surrealist art. As before, the web has its uses especially when it comes to discovering more about artists such as Biegas who were never prominent enough to be given more than a passing mention in art histories. Biegas isn’t really a Surrealist, however, although Apollinaire apparently liked some of his stylised sculptures. The paintings Biegas produced from around 1920 separate into two surprisingly different groups: semi-abstract portraits rather like the later wholly abstract works of František Kupka, and the Symbolist-styled nocturnes featured here. I naturally prefer the latter, not least because some of them nod to the dark cypresses and islands that populate many of Arnold Böcklin’s paintings, but the portraits and sculptures are often very good as well. There’s an artist’s website although the reproductions there are small and watermarked.

Lord Byron (1919).

Chopin (1919).

Grotto of the Temple of Secrets (1924).

Continue reading “The art of Bolesław Biegas (1877–1954)”

Weekend links 426

Self Preservation (1970–77), a collage by Penny Slinger from the series An Exorcism.

• RIP John Calder, one of the most important British publishers of the last century whose death was acknowledged in the Washington Post (and in the Telegraph, a paper that would have given him no support during his censorship battles) but at the time of writing hasn’t been mentioned at all in the increasingly useless Guardian. The omission in the latter seems even more surprising when Calder himself wrote obituaries for the paper, and they ran an archive piece two weeks ago for the 50th anniversary of Calder & Boyars’ successful court defence of Last Exit to Brooklyn. “Publishing is an industry run by capitalists now.”

• Another 50th anniversary: David Bushman asked Alan Moore for his memories of Patrick McGoohan’s superb TV series The Prisoner.

• Michael Moorcock in conversation with Hari Kunzru at Shakespeare and Company, Paris.

• Stephen O’Malley presents Acid Quarry Paris – In Session with Richard Pinhas (Heldon).

• When a rock is a stone: Louise Steinman on finding Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.

• Victorians, Vaults, and Violet Water: a profusion of links at Greydogtales.

• Mix of the week: FACT mix 666 by Róisín Murphy.

• The amazing adventures of Melinda Gebbie.

• Starbirthed

• Exorcism (1971) by Lucifer | The Final Calling (Physical Exorcism) (1984) by CTI | Exorcism Of The Hippies (2010) by Mater Suspiria Vision

Weekend links 425

Art by Ichiro Tsuruta.

• “Writing is so much about subverting dogmatisms of all kinds, above all the ones that insist you cannot go there! You must not say that! Writers need to go anywhere, to take anything on. And the only rule is to do it well.” Rikki Ducornet in a feature at Dennis Cooper’s which has been linked here before but was previously on DC’s old (now deleted) blog.

• “This book-cover trend is turning bookstores into flower shops,” says Kenzie Bryant. “How publishing’s floral-print trend came to rule the world’s bookshelves.” (Where “the world” means the USA, as usual…)

• The third edition of Wyrd Daze—”The multimedia zine of speculative fiction + extra-ordinary music, art & writing”—is out now.

For this listener, Nardis has become a full-on musical obsession. I have more than ninety official and bootleg recordings of the tune stored in the cloud, ranked in a fluid and continually updated order of preference, so they follow me wherever I go. In my travels as a writer, I use Nardis as a litmus test of musical competence: if I see a jazz band in a bar or a busker taking requests, I inevitably suggest it. (If they’ve never heard of it, I understand that they must be new at this game.) By now I’ve heard so many different interpretations, in such a far-flung variety of settings, that a Platonic ideal of the melody resides in my mind untethered to any actual performance. It’s as if Nardis were always going on somewhere, with players dropping in and out of a musical conversation beyond space and time.

Steve Silberman on the obsession that he and pianist Bill Evans share with Nardis, a Miles Davis composition that Davis himself never recorded

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 263 by Jung An Tagen, and XLR8R Podcast 554 by Tutu.

• “René Magritte still has the power to surprise,” says Sophie Haigney.

• Ishmael Reed at the Brockport Writers Forum, 1st May, 1974.

• The On-U Sound label is now at Bandcamp.

• Brian Eno talks music, global politics, etc.

• Faded Flowers (1985) by Shriekback | Other Flowers (2003) by Harold Budd | White Flowers (2014) by Lutine

Weekend links 424

Black Sun (1953) by Alexander Calder.

• “But Berlin Alexanderplatz transcends its genre elements, largely because of Döblin’s deep lack of hope about what can be expected of human beings.” Adam Kirsch on Alfred Döblin’s Berlin.

• “I occasionally dream of finding books that do not seem to exist (yet), and sometimes remember their titles,” says Mark Valentine.

• “I don’t read fiction.” He does, however, own 11,000 books. Alan Garner on writing a memoir of his wartime childhood.

What is it that I really like? I mean that’s the question that I think every musician and artists and everybody actually, is asking themselves; what they really like. And that means the emphasis is on REALLY like, meaning how do you push aside what you’ve been told, what you’ve been taught, what your friends like, and how much you like something because your friends like it or because it’s socially popular at the moment, or your girlfriend likes it or any of those ideas.

Jon Hassell (again) in an interview at Ableton

• How Alexander Calder sparked a modern fascination with mobiles (sculptures, that is, not telephones).

• Deep in Italy, one man’s Surrealist mini-city sleeps: Francky Knapp on Tomaso Buzzi’s La Scarzuola.

• “Even before electricity, robots freaked people out”: Lisa Hix on the history of clockwork automata.

• Nicolas Winding Refn’s website devoted to neglected/abandoned films was launched this week.

• Mixes of the week: FACT Mix 664 by Lucy, and XLR8R Podcast 552 by Thomas Fehlmann.

• Jean-Paul Goude‘s best photograph: an androgynous Grace Jones.

• Marquis de Sade: 112 pages, 100 erotic illustrations.

• The world’s most beautiful libraries

• Sade Masoch (1968) by Bobby Callender | I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango) (1981) by Grace Jones | Black Sun (2011) by Demdike Stare