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June

Twelve Months of Flowers: June (no date) by Jacob van Huysum.

The month of June in paintings is overburdened by bland pastoral scenes and views of battles, the summer months being favourable ones for warfare. Pastoral content is still present in the following selection albeit with an attempt to show some variety. Leighton’s Flaming June is the most famous picture here. It’s also the most popular of the artist’s paintings, understandably so given its radiating an atmosphere of luscious (and possibly inadvertent) eroticism that he seldom achieved elsewhere.

From Croham Fields, Croydon, Surrey, Just before the First Thunderstorm, Tuesday 28 June 1892 (1892) by William Henry Hope.

June in the Austrian Tyrol (1892) by John MacWhirter.

Flaming June (1895) by Frederic Leighton.

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Victor Vasarely album covers

Terretektorh / Nomos Gamma (no date; late 60s) by Iannis Xenakis.

Xenakis and Victor Vasarely are paired again on this album cover from the late 1960s. Given how often record companies have used abstract artwork on the sleeves of classical recordings, especially those by 20th-century composers, you’d expect there to be more examples. There may well be but Discogs (always the easiest place to search) only turns up the following examples.

Chamber Concerto For 11 Instruments / Symphonic Variations (no date) by
Neils Viggo Bentzon / The Royal Danish Orchestra conducted by Jerzy Semkow.

Kontakte For Electronic Sounds, Piano And Percussion / Refrain For Three Instrumentalists (1968) by Aloys Kontarsky, Christoph Caskel, Karlheinz Stockhausen.

David Bowie (1969) by David Bowie.

I confess that until I began searching for Vasarely covers I hadn’t known that this was an early example. That’s partly down to David Bowie’s second album (the first in his official canon) having been reissued for years in a different cover with Bowie’s face filling the sleeve. The album reissues in 1999 restored the original design, one of the artist’s Folklore Planetaire series. The credit is to “Vaserelli”.

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Vasarely, a film by Peter Kassovitz

I’ve always liked Victor Vasarely’s brand of Op-Art so this short film from 1960 would be of interest even without the addition of a score, Neg-Ale, by Iannis Xenakis. Considering the stature of the composer the music fails to add much at all so it’s no surprise to read at Ubuweb that Xenakis later withdrew it from his catalogue. Kassovitz’s film is worth watching for Vasarely’s artworks, however, especially some three-dimensional creations I hadn’t seen before.

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• Escher and Schrofer

The art of Fay Pomerance, 1912–2001

The Sixth Palace of Hell (1945).

Fay Pomerance’s painting of Lilith makes a startling appearance in a book I have about the history of magic symbols, and it’s that appearance which prompts this post since I’ve never seen her work given any attention elsewhere. This seems surprising when women artists, and artists whose concerns encompass mysticism or the occult, are receiving greater attention than ever before.

The Union of Isis and Osiris (1959).

Pomerance was British, and had the misfortune to be working during a lengthy period when expressions of the imagination or unorthodox spirituality in visual art were regarded as suspect or even disreputable. Her work also stands apart from any of the prevailing movements which provide such convenient labels for those art critics and writers who dislike anything that won’t fit into one of their boxes. The Lilith picture shows an obvious debt to another British artist who stands apart from the crowd: William Blake. The BBC’s Your Paintings site has a few of Pomerance’s larger works from the collection at Durham University, including the Sphere of Redemption below which is painted on a fibreglass globe, but for the moment there isn’t a dedicated site representing her art.

The Temptation (date unknown).

The Sphere of Redemption (date unknown).

May

View of Fuji from Miho Bay, May (1830) by Utagawa Kunisada.

No weekend links this week, unfortunately. The past few days have been spent re-establishing some equilibrium following the technical upheavals of the previous weeks, including updating things on the old computer so it can be the main work machine until the new one is fixed. Consequently I’ve spent no time at all looking at blogs or reading RSS feeds.

Continuing the monthly post of month-related paintings, and May is a difficult month to search for when its name is also a woman’s name and a word that turns up in other contexts: the BBC’s Your Paintings website is rendered almost completely useless by the profusion of portraits of the nation’s mayors through the ages. As months go there’s an understandable emphasis on the blossoming of the natural world. Some examples are represented here, together with a few less obvious depictions.

A May Morning in Moret (1886) by Alfred Sisley.

La Belle Jardiniere: May (1896) by Eugène Grasset.

May Morn (1899) by John Henry Twachtman.

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