{painting} – Page 57 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 474

AS11-40-5877 (1969).

• A minimum of Moon-related links this week because this is a subject I always return to. Previous links to NASA’s photo archives are now redundant after they changed their website but the archive of photos from the Apollo missions are currently hosted on Flickr…while Flickr lasts, anyway. The Albums section features whole film rolls from each of the missions.

• Mixes of the week: Stephen O’Malley presents In Session: Richard Pinhas (a re-posting of a mix from last year), and The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. XVII by David Colohan.

• Living With The Human Machines: experimental artist Sarah Angliss speaks to Matthew Neale about the cyborgs, dummies and ghosts that populate her work.

• On And On And On: A Guide to Generative Electronic Music. Related: Deconstructing Brian Eno’s Music for Airports.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jesse Bransford presents…A List of Grimoires for the Twilight of the Age of the Book.

• A Dandy in Aspic exclusive: Paul Gallagher interviewed cult author Derek Marlowe in 1984.

• From Ted Hughes to HG Wells: Jeanette Winterson picks the best books about the Moon.

• Tate acquires vast archive of British surrealist Ithell Colquhoun.

• At Greydogtales: Ten supernatural stories which stay with you.

• Emptyset turn to machine learning on new album Blossoms.

• Paul Grimstad on the absolute originality of Georges Perec.

• Valerie Stivers on cooking with Bruno Schulz.

• Blown out ’77: in the studio with Suicide.

• Astronauts on record covers.

• Back Side Of The Moon (1991) by The Orb | Moonshot (1999) by Hallucinator | Under The Moon (2019) by Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno

Weekend links 472

Poster art by Hiroo Isono.

• “[Divine] didn’t want to pass as a woman; he wanted to pass as a monster. He was thought up to scare hippies. And that’s what he wanted to do. He wanted to be Godzilla. Well, he wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor and Godzilla put together.” I can’t help linking to yet another John Waters interview when he always has things like this to say.

• Fifty shades of grey: great towers of the Eastern bloc photographed by David Navarro & Martyna Sobecka.

• Seeking Beastliness and Defining Beauty: Clive Hicks-Jenkins on visualisations of Beauty and the Beast.

• Fire Temple by Bobby Krlic (The Haxan Cloak) from the Midsommar soundtrack.

• Brad Jolliff & Mark Robinson on the scientific legacy of the Apollo programme.

• John Boardley on Renaissance memes and the chemical pleasure garden.

• “It’s important to go out and feel the so-called reality,” says David Lynch.

• Peter Strickland talks to Robert Barry about his new film, In Fabric.

• Nico in Manchester: “She loved the architecture—and the heroin”.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 292 by Paco Sala.

• Andrei Codrescu on the many lives of Lafcadio Hearn.

• Hiroo Isono: Into the Depths of the Sacred Forest.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Queer.

• The Beast (1956) by Milt Buckner | The Beast (1989) by Rhythm Devils | Beast (1994) by Brian Eno

Fantasmagie

Another post with a Belgian theme (a coincidence despite my present preoccupation with Franco-Belgian culture), and another that has to be filed under “further research required”. The splendidly titled Fantasmagie was founded by author Serge Hutin and artist Aubin Pascale, and was the newsletter/review for the Centre International pour l’étude de l’Art Fantastique et Magique. 52 issues were published from 1959 to 1979 charting the Belgian continuation of the Surrealist project.

I’d been hoping there might be a collection of all the issues online somewhere but this isn’t the case to date. However, the first 11 issues may be browsed in full at Scribd or downloaded if you use one of the PDF scrapers (search for “Scribd free”). Each issue showcases art by contemporary Surrealists or practitioners of what Ernst Fuchs called Fantastic Realism, all of which was of little interest to the art establishment of the time so from our perspective the artists are fresh discoveries. Issue 8, which is a collage special, is especially good.

Continue reading “Fantasmagie”

The art of Jacob Bendien, 1890–1933

Corner of a Canal (1919–20).

This week’s post is another by Sander Bink about a Dutch artist whose work may be unfamiliar to those outside the Netherlands. Jacob Bendien was certainly new to me. My thanks again to Sander for the post.

* * *

Jacob Bendien, born in Amsterdam in 1890, was one of the pioneers of abstract art (“absolut art” as Bendien and kindred artistic spirits called it) but is nevertheless little known in the Anglophone world. In the Netherlands he is not ignored or forgotten since he is mentioned in most overviews of early Dutch abstract art. Bendien’s work belongs to a somewhat later period than the other Dutch artists in this series but can be related thematically via his roots in the mystical/Symbolist art from around 1900.

Although Bendien was an early admirer of Mondrian’s art, his work differs from Neo-plasticism in its use of lines and round forms instead of bars and straight lines.

Composition (1912); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Peinture I (1912); Centraal Museum, Utrecht.

Two examples of Bendien’s early abstractions are the graceful oil-on-canvas Composition from 1912, and the slightly Surrealist portrait Peinture I from the same year.

Amsterdam Canal (1916).

Somewhere between Surrealism, Modernism and Symbolism is the lithograph Amsterdam Canal which could just as well be a décor for some German Expressionist movie from the 1920s.

Seven Masks (1917); Museum Belvédère, Heerenveen.

Surreal and Redon-like is his chalk drawing Seven Masks from 1917.

Melancholy (1917).

Around 1916 Bendien made some drawings which seem to be directly inspired by Dutch Decadent-Symbolist artist Carel de Nerée (see this Dutch article) of which his self-portrait Melancholy is a fine example.

Musician.

More realist but quite endearing is his Musician lithograph from the early 1920s.

As far as I know the last Bendien exhibition was in Utrecht in 1985. His work is hard to find and rarely offered on sale although if one is lucky one can find his lithographs.

Sander Bink

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Henricus Jansen, 1867–1921
• The art of Antoon van Welie, 1866–1956
• The art of Simon Moulijn, 1866–1948
• René Gockinga revisited
• Gockinga’s Bacchanal and an unknown portrait of Fritz Klein
• More from the Decadent Dutch

The art of Maurice Wade, 1917–1991

Canal at Longport (1970s).

Maurice Wade‘s paintings of factories and back streets in Staffordshire are perfect examples of what the I Ching would call “accumulation through restraint”, using a flat rendering and a limited palette to achieve effects that a more detailed examination would fail to capture. Many of Algernon Cecil Newton‘s paintings possess the same stillness, and also depict the parts of urban Britain that are usually shunned as artistic subjects—in the case of canals, the literal backwaters—but Wade’s paintings are even more depopulated, silent and still. Henry Birks discusses Wade’s life and work here, noting that the artist painted over 300 landscapes. He’s evidently overdue for greater recognition.

Canal at Middleport (1976).

Canal at Longport III (1970s).

Kitchen Chimneys (1964).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Valette’s steam and smoke