{symbolists} – Page 5 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 504

Eric Burdon and the Animals, Mother Earth, Hour Glass; Fillmore Auditorium, October 19-21, 1967 by Bonnie MacLean.

• RIP Bonnie MacLean, another of the original San Francisco poster artists, and the only woman of note in the US psychedelic poster scene. (Not the only woman, however; in Europe we had Marijke Koger.) Related: Bonnie MacLean’s posters at Wolfgang’s. And RIP to illustrator Tom Adams, an artist whose exceptional covers for novels by Agatha Christie are only one part of a long and varied career.

• The Litanies Of Satan (1982), the short but uncompromising debut album by Diamanda Galás, is reissued on Galás’s own label later this month. Further albums from her remarkable back catalogue will follow. Related: video of Galás performing The Litanies Of Satan in 1985.

• “Scorsese is amazed that United Artists didn’t touch one frame of Raging Bull, since it’s the first time in his life as a feature director that this has apparently occurred.” In 1981 Derek Malcolm talked to Martin Scorsese about his reasons for making a boxing picture.

“…in a post-AIDS world, its scenes of mass male-on-male decadence evoke a sense of the spiritual: Not to put so blunt a phrase on it, but the majority of the men we see in Cruising‘s bars would likely die within the next decade, victims of a very heterosexual genocide of neglect. These are blurred, melancholic memories locked forever within Cruising‘s celluloid; a phantasmagoria of men whose liberation was not legislatively delivered, but recovered in the privacy of leather bars and cruising joints. The film’s overt sexuality makes it hard to escape a sense of catastrophic loss.”

Jack King on William Friedkin’s Cruising

• The Pet Shop Boys’ eccentric feature film, It Couldn’t Happen Here (1988), is released on blu-ray and DVD in June. The video for You Were Always On My Mind gives an idea of the contents.

• “Orion being one of the brightest constellations makes it a lot of people’s favourites, and he was my favourite as a kid.” Ben Chasny on his history of stargazing.

• “You think the Holy Grail is lost? No. I have it on my piano.” John Boorman talks to Xan Brooks.

• Laura Cumming on the dark and haunting paintings of Belgian Symbolist Léon Spilliaert.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 631 by Ondness.

• Alistair Ryder chooses 10 great killer plant films.

• Howl by John Foxx And The Maths.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Gleam.

• The Litanies Of Satan (1969) by Ruth White | Grail (1971) by Grail | Plants’ Music (1981) by Ippu-Do

Exlibris (Bucheignerzeichen)

I don’t use bookplates, and don’t know anyone who does, but the conjunction between art and literature is a fascinating one. Exlibris (Bucheignerzeichen) (1909) by Walter von Zur Westen explores the history of the bookplate, and would no doubt answer some of my questions about the form if it wasn’t in German throughout, and also typeset in the semi-legible Fraktur style that used to be de rigueur for all German texts.

We still have the illustrations, however, and these range from woodcut engravings to contemporary works in pencil and ink, with many of the later contributions being from established artists whose names are familiar today; among the examples below are works by Symbolists Max Klinger, Fernand Khnopff and Felicien Rops. There’s also an especially fine example by Charles Ricketts. The latter are a reminder that bookplate commissions were a common thing for 19th-century artists, although their efforts are seldom seen outside collections such as this. Much of Zur Westen’s history is devoted to the German regions but later chapters cover other European countries and the United States.

Continue reading “Exlibris (Bucheignerzeichen)”

Picturing Vermilion Sands

First UK edition, 1971. Art by Brian Knight.

Vermilion Sands (1971) is a story collection by JG Ballard which maintains a cult reputation despite being overshadowed by its author’s more popular (and notorious) novels. Most of the stories were written in the 1960s—a couple of them are among Ballard’s earliest works—but where many of his other short stories can read like the work of a writer with bills to pay, the tales of Vermilion Sands are much closer to Ballard’s core interests, filled with symbolic resonance and literary allusion.

Vermilion Sands, the place, is a near-future resort with a desert climate and an unspecified location; a locale where the Côte d’Azur meets Southern California but the ocean is a sea of sand. While each story has a different artistic or cultural theme, all the stories are populated by the idle midde-class types found in the rest of Ballard’s work. Ballard was more receptive to visual art, especially painting, than many authors, particularly the SF writers of his generation for whom art was less interesting than science and technology. There is science and technology in these stories (some of the latter is now inevitably dated) but it doesn’t dominate the proceedings. The stories derive less from scientific speculation than from Ballard’s desire to create a future he would have been happy to inhabit himself, an alternative to the grim dystopias which proliferate in science fiction. The background furnishings also reflect the author’s ideal, owing much to the Surrealist landscapes of Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, a pair of artists whose works are often referenced in Ballard’s fiction. Given all of this you’d expect that cover artists might have risen to the challenge more than they have. What follows is a look at the most notable attempts to depict Vermilion Sands or its population, only a few of which are covers for the book itself.

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Bruges in photochrom

Maison du France.

I’ve looked through the Library of Congress collection of photochrom prints many times but somehow never noticed the 20 or so prints of Bruges until now. The Belgian Symbolists recorded their fascination with the Belgian town in paintings, drawings, photographs and Georges Rodenbach’s novel, Bruges-la-Morte (1892). The latter came illustrated by photographs that showed the town’s depopulated streets and empty canals, an early example of a novel using photography to support its text. Rodenbach’s photographs are all black-and-white, of course, and not the greatest quality (see this copy of the book). These photochrom prints may not be strictly accurate in their colours but they date from the same period as Rodenbach’s pictures; they also contain much more detail, and many of them replicate Rodenbach’s views. The ones here show the canals and gates but the library archive includes several views of the squares and the famous medieval Belfry of Bruges.

St. Croix Gate.

Ghent Gate.

Continue reading “Bruges in photochrom”

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.

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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