{religion} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 806

Cover art by George Wilson for The Twilight Zone #45, September 1972. Via.

• At Public Domain Review: Thea Applebaum Licht on the history of art within art, or cabinets of curiosity and paintings within paintings.

• The final 2025 catalogue of lots for the After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn. etc.

• At Smithsonian Mag: See the “Mona Lisa of Illuminated Manuscripts,” a 600-Year-Old Bible covered in intricate illustrations.

It’s amazing, the number of people out there who love everything about queer life except for queer sex, who would prefer that sex and sexual orientation live in entirely different zip codes, that they exist as non-overlapping magisteria; it’s so much safer that way. Who wants gay sex polluting their enjoyment of the abstraction that is Being Gay?

That is what gay love is, now, in the collective imagination of American commerce: a set of identity relations projected onto bored and indifferent celebrities who will half-heartedly play along with the idea because doing so moves units and, anyway, what does it cost them? The more that sexual orientation slouches to the point of pure abstraction, the less effort it takes. Anyone and anything can be gay, now, because gay is just a set of pompous liberal cultural signifiers that have no earthly material relation to homosexuals.

“I miss when homoeroticism was erotic,” says Freddie deBoer. I’ve made similar complaints myself over the years. For some genuinely erotic homoeroticism, see the latest auction link above.

• At Ultrawolveunderthefullmoon: Illustrations for Edmund Weiss’s Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt.

• DJ Food’s latest harvestings of psychedelic ephemera may be seen here.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Bruce Connor’s Day.

• The Strange World of…David Lynch.

• RIP Udo Kier and Tom Stoppard.

• Atlanta Surrealist Group

• Menergy (1981) by Patrick Cowley | Eros Arriving (1982) by Bill Nelson | Erotic City (“Make Love Not War Erotic City Come Alive”) (1984) by Prince & The Revolution

Evelyn Paul’s Myths & Legends of Japan

I don’t think I’ve encountered anything by British artist Evelyn Paul (1883–1963) before, but she illustrated a number of books before and after Myths & Legends of Japan, a guide to Japanese folklore which was published in 1912. The book by F. Hadland Davis differs from similar volumes which tend to be simple recountings of folk tales with accompanying illustrations. Davis recounts specific stories but his volume is a more thorough guide to all forms of Japanese folk culture, with chapters on religious tradition and superstition, as well as separate chapters devoted to trees, thunderstorms, bells, mirrors, tea, Mount Fuji, foxes and supernatural beings. The book as a whole runs to over 500 pages, ending with a number of contextual appendices. Davis also lists his sources (Lafcadio Hearn, for one) which you don’t usually find in books of this type. Two of the illustrations show characters from Kwaidan, Hearn’s ghost-story collection: the sinister Lady of the Snow, and the hapless musician Hoichi the Earless.

Evelyn Paul’s illustrations strive to balance the traditional elements of ukiyo-e print-making with the watercolour style that was a common feature of illustrated books at this time. The combination doesn’t always work as well as it might—the nebulosity of watercolour painting runs counter to the definition and flatness of woodcut prints—but her illustrations still look more Japanese than European. To be fair to the artist, colour printing using photo separations was still in its infancy in 1912, and Paul’s paintings seem muddier in reproduction than they might have been in their original state. Davis’s book was published by Harrap, Harry Clarke’s London publisher, and you find similar deficiences in the reproduction of Clarke’s paintings.

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Four Horsemen

Drie Apocalyptische Ruiters (c. 1943) by Willem Adolfs.

Willem Adolfs’ painting only shows three Horsemen of the Apocalypse but his picture is too good to be buried at the foot of this post. Adolfs was a Dutch artist whose work I hadn’t looked at before. His painting is a product of wartime, so the absence of the white horse (usually symbolising war) may perhaps be taken as referring to the conditions of its production. Adolfs spent the later war years in German concentration camps, dying in one near Hamburg in 1945.

Saint John sees the Four Horsemen (no date) by Jean Duvet.

After looking at Albrecht Dürer’s apocalyptic woodcuts last week I went searching for more depictions of the Four Horsemen. The quartet are the most familiar characters of the Book of Revelation, and such a useful symbol that their appearance has over the centuries become detached from their Biblical origins. War, Pestilence, Famine and Death embody perennial, universal fears, they don’t require a Christian framing to be acknowledged.

Apocalypse flamande (15th century).

There are many depictions of the Four Horsemen, especially from earlier centuries when war in particular tended to arrive on horseback. Recent depictions are less common. In 19th-century art Christian symbols had a cultural weight they no longer possess; paintings of Lucifer or the Whore of Babylon are staples of metal album covers but you’re unlikely to find them in art galleries.

Death on a Pale Horse (1796) by Benjamin West.

The Bruce Pennington paintings at the end of the post are unusual in this respect, being relatively recent and seriously intended despite being the work of an artist known mainly for his book covers. The paintings are from Eschatus, an album-sized volume published by Paper Tiger/Dragon’s World in 1976. The book is a series of pictures illustrating Pennington’s own translations of the prophecies of Nostradamus, a cycle of events which he depicts as apocalyptic science fiction. It’s a strange work, and not a very comprehensible one, but it does include the inevitable Horsemen on the cover painting, along with a portrait of Death (aka Ghost Rider) which appears in a detail on the back cover.

Vidi, quod aperuisset agnus… (1809) by Luigi Sabatelli.

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Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse

Revelation of St. John.

In Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy, John of Patmos, the author of the Book of Revelation, is referred to as “Saint John the Mushroom-head”, the suggestion being that the bizarre and grotesque scenes listed at the end of the Bible were the result of hallucinogenic frenzy. Mushroom-derived or not, John’s apocalyptic visions have fuelled the imagination of artists for a very long time, and in a wide variety of media. The earlier chapters of the New Testament are the more popular ones when it comes to adaptations but only the Book of Revelation has inspired two monuments of progressive rock: the 666 album by Aphrodite’s Child, and Supper’s Ready by Genesis.

Martyrdom of Saint John the Evangelist.

Die Offenbarung St. Johannis (1900) is a recent upload at the Internet Archive which presents Albrecht Dürer’s magnificent set of Apocalypse woodcuts in a single volume. Multiple copies of the same prints may be found at Wikimedia Commons but sets of pictures there are always divided into separate pages; where possible, I prefer to have a book to leaf through. I love to pore over Dürer’s prints, they’re always crowded with tiny details rendered with great precision. The fifth plate in this series, showing the arrival of the Four Horsemen, is the one you see reproduced most often, and it’s a typically cramped composition; Dürer was an artist who often seemed to want to cram as much as possible into the available space. Some of the later plates in the series have the same powerful sense of occult strangeness that you find in the best alchemical engravings, especially plate eleven which shows John being instructed by an angel with a blazing face to eat a book. The Biblical text describes the angel as appearing suspended over columns of fire, but Dürer shows the columns as a pair of architectural limbs that happen to be burning at their terminations. It’s an example of proto-Surrealist imagery that makes me wonder what a set of Albrecht Dürer Tarot cards might have looked like.

Vision of the Seven Candlesticks.

Saint John Before God and the Elders.

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Continue reading “Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse”

Weekend links 778

Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons (c. 1470–75) by Martin Schongauer.

• “Physique was a response to restrictions and laws that kept photographers on a short leash, and what made it lively was they were constantly pulling at that leash.” Vince Aletti discussing Physique, his new book about the history of homoerotic photography. There’s more homoerotica at the latest Vallots After Dark art auction.

• Mentioned here before, but I was reminded of the place last week: 366 Weird Movies, “Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!”

• “When the gods and goddesses of the great religions first emerged, they came into a world already populated with daimons.” David Gordon White on the many lives of Eurasian daimonology.

• At The Wire: Read an extract from Studio Electrophonique: The Sheffield Space Age From The Human League To Pulp.

• At Public Domain Review: Gilded Fish—Illustrations from Histoire naturelle des dorades de la Chine (1780).

• SFJAZZ Digital Media Archive: “…over 2,000 recordings of jazz, world, folk, and roots artists”.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – May 2025 at Ambientblog.

• New music: Lake Deep Memory by Pye Corner Audio.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Ella.

• Ella Guru (1970) by Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band | Ella Megalast Burls Forever (1988) by Cocteau Twins | Ella (1996) by Faust