A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Gay
Shiny bequiffed poser wants to be left alone to contemplate…something or other. An example of the Flandrin pose from the beefcake era which comes via a Vintage Gay Themed Photos set at Flickr.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive
Goddem with Attendants (1924) by Harry Clarke.
• Some of Harry Clarke’s extraordinary illustrations from Goethe’s Faust can be seen at A Journey Round My Skull. And a reminder for anyone who missed them, Clarke’s Poe illustrations at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.
• HP Lovecraft – Audio Books, Radio Plays, & Audio Documentaries. Out-of-print recordings and (no doubt) pirate copies of more recent things. I found this page by accident so it was a surprise to see my 1999 Lovecraft portrait used there. I used to own the David McCallum Dunwich Horror, an album with a singularly appalling sleeve illustration.
• Better album sleeves can be found here: Prospective 21e Siècle, a collection of foil designs from 1967. Some of the very challenging music within can be downloaded at the Avant Garde Project archive. Related: Have an electroacoustic Halloween with İlhan Mimaroğlu’s Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe (1964) and Wings of the Delirious Demon (1969).
Star Trails and the Captain’s Ghost, a photo by Chris Kotsiopoulos at Astronomy Picture of the Day.
• “The horror industry is totally male dominated from its directors to its slashers, and even its bloggers…and I think that needs to change.” Day of the Woman, a blog for the feminine side of fear.
• 6 of the Scariest Queer Horror Books Ever. I think I’d agree with the commenter in picking The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.
• Designer Jonathan Barnbrook (pictured in a graveyard by the looks of things) is interviewed at MyFonts.
• A Weird and Scratching Beauty: The Art of John Coulthart and Call of Cthulhu.
• Is the Royal Masonic School for Boys the scariest building in Britain?
• 50-million-year-old insect trove found in Indian amber.
• The Café Kaput Samhain 2010 mixtape.
• Monster Mash (1962) by Bobby “Boris” Pickett & The Crypt-Kickers.
Marian Bantjes designs the cover of the latest Creative Review and there’s a feature about her work inside.
• “…the question: ‘was Shakespeare gay?’ strikes me as so daft as to be barely worth answering. Of course he was. Arguably he was bisexual, of sorts, but his heart was never on his straight side.” Don Paterson throws the cat among the pigeons in an examination of the Shakespeare’s sonnets. Related (sort of): Shakespeare and Company: The bookshop that thinks it’s a hotel. Also related: Jeanette Winterson revisits Shakespeare and Company.
• 100 orbs of light float in the Schuylkill River. Also in Philadelphia: Animators Amok in a Curiosity Cabinet: the Brothers Quay are making a film in the Mütter Museum. Can’t wait to see it.
• More Alan Moore: Fossil Angels, a lengthy essay about magic and the occult, was written in 2002 but hasn’t been given a public airing until now.
• Alberto Manguel is always worth reading:
As Borges was well aware even then, the history of literature is the history of this paradox. On the one hand, the deeply rooted intuition writers have that the world exists, in Mallarmé’s much-abused phrase, to result in a beautiful book (or, as Borges would have it, even a mediocre book), and, on the other hand, to know that the muse governing the enterprise is, as Mallarmé called her, the Muse of Impotence (or, to use a freer translation, the Muse of Impossibility). Mallarmé added later that all who have ever written anything, even those we call geniuses, have attempted this ultimate Book, the Book with a capital B. And all have failed.
• Here Comes Everybody: Wake In Progress is a self-described “foolhardy attempt to illustrate Finnegans Wake”. Easier to illustrate than make a film of the book, I’d have thought, and Mary Ellen Bute already attempted the latter.
Psychic Explosion: Adolf Hoffmeister’s illustrations for a 1967 edition of Lautréamont’s Poesies at A Journey Round My Skull.
• Craig Colorusso’s Sun Boxes can be seen at Turner Falls, Massachusetts, during November.
• Clive Hicks-Jenkins has a book and retrospective exhibition of his art due next year.
• A sneak peek into The Steampunk Bible to which I’m a contributor. And also here.
• “Human or other; depends who comes”: the Ballardian films of Paul Williams.
• Transmission (1979) by Joy Division; Transmission (1995) by Low; Monkey (2010) by Robert Plant.
They’ve got fencing masks, white undies and white socks so, really, who needs the swords? From Isaac y Manu, a series by Gorka Postigo who I’m pleased to say makes a feature of white underwear in other shoots such as this one. Via Homotography.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with swords archive
Salomé: Der Wunsch.
Back in March I wrote something about Alex Koch’s art periodical, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, a guide to German arts, crafts and architecture founded in Darmstadt in 1897. The Internet Archive has a nearly complete run of these and I’ve recently been working my way through their scans, a process which takes a while as there’s more than 10,000 pages to be looked at. When I find the time I’ll be posting some of the finds from this wonderful publication, the early issues of which are devoted to the best examples of the Art Nouveau style in Germany and elsewhere.
Salomé: Die Erfüllung.
For now, however, I can’t resist posting these pictures from volume 18 (April–Spetember 1906) which form part of a feature about German illustrator Marcus Behmer. I’ve only seen one or two of Behmer’s drawings before and they didn’t really show him at his best. What’s immediately apparent is the great debt his work owed at this point to Aubrey Beardsley, right down to the treatment of foliage and a deliberately grotesque approach to character. It’s also good to find another treatment of the Salomé theme in black-and-white, and the pictures here are credited as being based on Wilde’s play.
Salomé: Das Opfer.
Wikipedia has a page about the artist but it’s all in German, unfortunately, so a crude translation has to suffice. As with Beardsley, the grotesquerie extended to the sexual sphere and it would be nice to know more about the byways of Behmer’s career if only to see where his curious erotic drawings pieces come from. Wikipedia notes that “Behmer was already since 1903 member in the first homosexual organization of the world in Berlin” so I assume that means he was part of Adolf Brand’s circle, and may have contributed to Brand’s publication Der Eigene. A few examples of the erotic work can be found here and here. Further examples from Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration follow.
Continue reading “The art of Marcus Behmer, 1879–1958”