{painting} – Page 80 – { feuilleton }

The art of Arkhip Kuindzhi, 1842–1910

Red Sunset on the Dnieper (c. 1905–1908).

Another Russian painter I’d not come across before, Arkhip Kuindzhi had a fondness for sunsets, moonlight and isolated plumes of cumulus, all of which he painted and repainted obsessively. The obvious model for these atmospheric studies is Caspar David Friedrich although Kuindzhi’s work isn’t as hyper-real, and lacks Friedrich’s Romantic mysticism. One detail that stood out for me in reading about Kuindzhi’s career was that Nicholas Roerich was one of his art pupils. Anyone familiar with Roerich’s paintings of Himalayan mountains will recognise a precursor in his teacher’s many studies of Mount Elbrus and other Caucasus peaks.

Clouds (1905).

The Elbrus, Moonlit Night (1890–1895).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vasily Vereshchagin’s temples
• Friedrich and Schinkel
• Winter light

Weekend links 267

Black Fever (2010) by Polly Morgan.

• “She was something of an Auntie Mame figure for me. We spent years haunting secondhand bookstores in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and New York, talking for hours over ever more bizarre dishes of Chinese Hakka cuisine in a hole-in-the-wall eatery at Stockton and Broadway in San Francisco, watching Kenneth Anger flicks and the surrealistic stop-motion puppet masterpieces of Ladislas Starevich, which Tom Luddy would screen for us at the Pacific Film Archive, over and over again until our eyeballs nearly fell out.” Steve Wasserman remembers Susan Sontag.

• California Dreams is “the first career-spanning compendium of Mouse’s work; it includes his recent landscapes and figurative paintings. Taken as a whole, the work is a weird, gilded, space-age, flame-licked way to chart the rise of late-twentieth-century youth culture”. Jeffery Gleaves on the psychedelic art of Stanley Mouse.

• “Not only does moral preoccupation corrupt the artfulness of fiction, but fiction is an inefficient and insincere vehicle for moralizing,” says Alice Gregory, joining Pankaj Mishra to address the question: “Do Moralists Make Bad Novelists?”

Nabokov’s posthumously published Lectures on Literature reprints a corny magazine ad that Nabokov liked to show to his students at Cornell, as an example of a certain kind of sunny American materialism and kitsch (or poshlost, in Russian): it’s an ad for flatware featuring a young housewife, hands clasped, eyes brimming as she contemplates a place setting. Nabokov titled it “Adoration of Spoons,” and it undoubtedly played a significant role in his creation of the suburban widow Charlotte Haze. From such strangely endearing trash was a masterpiece born.

John Colapinto reviewing Nabokov in America by Robert Roper

• “How many typefaces is too many typefaces?” asks Adrian Shaughnessy. “What happens to our ability to discriminate and exercise good judgment when we have a near-infinite number of possibilities?”

• At BUTT: a clip from one of the more dreamlike scenes in Wakefield Poole’s gay porn film, Bijou (1972). Poole’s “sensual memoir”, Dirty Poole, is published by Lethe Press.

• John Banville reviews The Prince of Minor Writers, selected essays of Max Beerbohm edited by Phillip Lopate.

• My thanks once again to Dennis Cooper for featuring this blog on his list of cultural favourites.

• More Moogery: Sarah Angliss, Gazelle Twin and Free School in the Moog Sound Lab.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 394 by Francesca Lombardo.

• Atlas Obscura gets to grips with the enormous Devil’s Bible.

• Feel You, a new song by Julia Holter.

• Spoonful (1960) by Howlin’ Wolf | Spoon (1972) by Can | Spoon (2013) by Mazzy Star

Brion Gysin record covers

Shots (1977) by Steve Lacy.

Continuing an occasional series about artists or designers whose work has been used on record sleeves. The life and work of Brion Gysin (1916–1986) is the subject of a new exhibition, Unseen Collaborator, that opened last week at October Gallery, London. The gallery page mentions Gysin’s connections to the music world: among other things, it was Gysin’s enthusiasm for the Master Musicians of Jajouka that gave those people and their music global prominence, with a little help from Brian Jones. But there are other connections, whether as a collaborator with Steve Lacy, or as a decorator of album covers. Some of these uses are posthumous but this small collection includes a few releases I’d not come across before.

Troubles (1979) by The Steve Lacy Quintet.

Orgy Boys (1982) by Brion Gysin.

A 12-inch single with Gysin reading from William Burroughs and his own writings. “Songs dedicated to his orgy pals: William S. Burroughs, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Fafa de Palaminy, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg and John Giorno…”

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The art of Aleksandr Kosteckij

This is the kind of fantastic art I like a great deal: nebulous landscapes whose vast forms may be some kind of hybrid architecture; implications of the alien and mystical that retain some ambiguity; dreamlike without slipping into post-Surrealist cliché. Monsieur Thombeau at Full Fathom Five (whose excellent eye I have to thank once again) describes the paintings of Aleksandr Kosteckij/Kostetsky (1954–2010) as being “like Gustave Moreau, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst put in a blender and left out in the rain.” I’d place them somewhere between Ernst Fuchs and Bruce Pennington but Moreau’s chimeras are certainly present. You’d think an artist of this calibre with a large body of work would be better known, most of the attention at the moment seems to be on Russian websites. Let’s hope that changes soon.

Update: Thanks to Joe for pointing the way to this dedicated website, something I missed in my haste.

Examples chosen from these sites:
• http://vk.com/album-32941665_175452413 (139 images)
• http://www.2photo.ru/en/post/18614

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Invisible Cities: Miscellanea

Cover art: The Castle in the Pyrenees (1961) by René Magritte.

A final post for this week devoted to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and it occurs to me that “Miscellanea” could easily be the name of one of Marco Polo’s cities.

One thing that’s become apparent over the past few days is that this subject is a very popular one with artists, especially in Italy. This is understandable but it also means you could probably fill another week of posts pursuing further illustrations and homages. Rather than belabour things I’m ending with a few of the more notable derivations including some cover designs. The Einaudi volume above was the first printing in Italy in 1972.

Cover design by Arnold Skolnick.

And this was the first American edition from Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich in 1974. The cover is printed in silver foil which makes the book a particularly desirable item. This might explain why it’s also rather expensive today.

Cover art: Martyrdom of a Saint by Monsù Desiderio.

The 1979 Picador edition is one of two paperback editions I own. The enigmatic “Monsù Desiderio” has a confused identity (see this post), and specialised in curious architectural paintings so this is an apt choice.

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