A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Painting
The Four Elements: Water. A Fish Market with the Miraculous Draught of Fishes in the Background (1560–1574).
Flemish artist Joachim Beuckelaer (1533–1574) depicts the four elements using foodstuffs. All four paintings can be explored via Google’s Art Project.
The Four Elements: Fire. A Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary in the Background (1560–1574).
More sculptual work by Franz Metzner for a building whose interiors are in that ponderous Teutonic style which resembles designs for a fantasy film.
Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 20 covers the period from April 1907 to September 1907, and this is where this fascinating publication starts to run out of steam. A few more editions are worth looking at but after volume 25 the content collapses into the same welter of excessively dull genre painting and academic work that was plaguing Jugend magazine at this time. More about that later.
As usual, anyone wishing to see these samples in greater detail is advised to download the entire number at the Internet Archive. There’ll be more DK&D next week.
Water Serpents I by Gustav Klimt. See it in colour here.
Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Yesterday’s post concerned a Klimt-like artist, today volume 19, covering the period from October 1906 to March 1907, includes further work by Klimt himself. The Wiener Werkstätte, with whom Klimt was affiliated, continues to dominate these editions, understandably so when the architecture, art and design being produced by the group was some of the most advanced in the world. In addition to the customary graphics and interiors there’s also some examples of dress design by Gustav Klimt which I hadn’t seen before.
As usual, anyone wishing to see these samples in greater detail is advised to download the entire number at the Internet Archive. There’ll be more DK&D next week.
A portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein by Gustav Klimt. The sitter was the sister of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
A poster by Koloman Moser.
Ars, Scientia, Magia (2007) by Jesse Bransford.
Another art exhibition, and another group show at Observatory in Brooklyn, NYC, where some of my Lovecraft drawings were shown last year. Alchemically Yours is an alchemy-themed contemporary art show curated by Phantasmaphile‘s Pam Grossman, and she has this to say about the exhibition:
Like dreams, alchemy speaks in pictures. At first glimpse, alchemical manuscripts from the 16th and 17th centuries look like a panoply of hallucinations. They feature images of fornicating kings and queens. Suns and moons shining in stereo. Lions and serpents and eggs, oh my. Black and white and red all over. Secret codes and effulgent iconographies teeming with meaning, yet ultimately ineffable. These pictures beget picturing. They’re signs that beg to be resignified; to be reinterpreted and refined.
The participants in Alchemically Yours have done just that. Varying in medium and style, each piece in this exhibition pays homage to the alchemic tradition—all the while affirming that the artist fills the role of alchemist in the present-day. For who better can elevate the mundane, turn the sub- into the sublime? From the prima materia of color and canvas comes great and vivid work.
Caduceus (detail, 2011) by Robert M. Place.
The participating artists are Jesse Bransford, Molly Crabapple, Ted Enik, Marina Korenfeld, Adela Leibowitz, Sara Antoinette Martin, Ann McCoy, Robert M. Place, Ron Regé, Jr., J.L. Schnabel, Hunter Stabler, Panos Tsagaris.
Alchemically Yours opens on Saturday, May 7th, 2011, 7–10pm and will run from May 8th to June 12th, 2011.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Laurie Lipton’s Splendor Solis
• The Arms of the Art
• Splendor Solis
• Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae
• A Love Craft: Art Inspired by Monsters, Madness and Mythos
• Cabala, Speculum Artis Et Naturae In Alchymia
• Vision Quest
• Digital alchemy
• Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists
Film and opera posters by Franciszek Starowieyski (see below).
• At first glance, Jerzy Skolimowski’s new film, Essential Killing, sounds like Joseph Losey’s Figures in a Landscape (1970) reworked for our era of renditions, torture and war without end. The trailer is here; Sight & Sound liked the film and dismissed any Losey comparisons. The Quietus interviewed the director this week, and there’s also a video interview here.
“He was trying to tell the truth about war. In the 1950s the US was telling itself a mythic, grandiose, heroic story about the second world war and GI Joe saving the world. [James] Jones was saying, ‘That wasn’t the war I saw, I want to write something more honest and realistic. Whatever the mid-America myth, one of the things men were doing was giving blow jobs for money.'”
From Here to Eternity is published in an uncensored edition.
• Edogawa Rampo‘s sinister short story The Human Chair concerns a man who conceals himself inside a chair. Taiwanese artist Lan Hungh may have had Rampo’s story in mind for his Demolished Chair art piece about which we’re told “Hungh’s flaccid penis is the only body part that’s visible, and becomes hard as soon as anyone starts discussing the chair or sitting on it.” BUTT magazine spoke to the artist.
…unaware of their double standards, the police objected to the portrayal of men in Harrison’s work as demeaning. There was Hugh Hefner squeezed into a bunny girl costume, a beefy but emasculated Captain America wearing false breasts and a stars ‘n’ stripes-patterned basque, and Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who tried to murder Andy Warhol, stamping on his Brillo box artwork.
A piece about artist Margaret Harrison whose work is on show at Payne Shurvell, London.
• Connecting Science and Art: “Novelist Cormac McCarthy (!), filmmaker Werner Herzog, and physicist Lawrence Krauss discuss science as inspiration for art and Herzog’s new film on the earliest known cave paintings.”
• At Tumblr: Gurafiku, “a collection of visual research that encompasses the history of Japanese graphic design”, and Archidose.
• “Michael Moorcock’s Modem Times 2.0 is a good introduction to the literary legend.”
• The Spring 2011 edition of Periwinkle Journal (Queer Art + Creativity) is now live.
• Rick Poynor (again) on [Franciszek] Starowieyski’s Graphic Universe of Excess.
• Coudal now have a page of links for the great Terrence Malick.
• Wake in Progress is Finnegans Wake illustrated.
• Brown Study, a blog by Jay Babcock.
• RIP Sidney Lumet.
• Ry Cooder & The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces: Let’s Have a Ball is a film by Les Blank of a fantastic performance by Cooder’s band in Santa Cruz, California, in 1987. It’s not available on DVD but most of it can be seen on YouTube.