{photography} – Page 146

Sam Amidon and Valgeir Sigurdsson in Manchester

Sam and ensemble.

“Bedroom Community, possibly the best label in the world right now” was my earnest declaration back in March after seeing Sam Amidon play for the first time. A few months earlier I’d put Valgeir Sigurðsson‘s Ekvílibríum album on my best of 2007 list for Arthur magazine. Tonight’s event at Trinity Church confirmed that judgement with another great performance of songs from All Is Well by Sam, followed by a set from his Icelandic composer/producer colleague. Support for the evening was from Manchester’s own Denis Jones and a display of his one-man house of cards conjuring with samples and guitar.

Sam Amidon’s set this time lacked some of the stunning impact of the earlier gig but that’s only because the thrill of seeing him for the first time can’t be repeated. If anything the performances were better this time round, not least because there were more string players there to do justice to Nico Muhly‘s marvellous arrangements; Little Satchel especially benefited. Valgeir Sigurðsson (who produced All Is Well) helped out in the background then Sam returned the favour for Valgeir’s set, including singing one of the songs from Ekvílibríum. This easy swapping of roles is one of the things which makes Bedroom Community such a fascinating label; Valgeir produces, everyone plays on everyone else’s albums. All the people involved (Nico Muhly and Ben Frost make up the creative quartet) are highly distinctive and bring a considerable authority to their work. Most of Valgeir’s set this evening was instrumental (there are four songs on the album) and I missed Dawn McCarthy’s vocal on Winter Sleep but the vocal-less rendition gave an opportunity to hear the breadth of the arrangement. The BC site credits the other Icelandic musicians as Una Sveinbjarnardóttir on violin/mandolin, Sigríður Sunna Reynisdóttir on accordion/electric piano and Rebekka Bryndís Björnsdóttir on bassoon/cello.

“Bedroom community” is a euphemism for a suburb or dormitory town, as well as (in the case of the label) a play on the idea of the bedroom musician. Ignore the usual negative connotations of suburbs and think of this community as being one away from the decaying centre and the increasingly desperate frenzy of the mainstream. Back in the late Seventies Robert Fripp was presciently declaring the age of the music dinosaurs over, saying “In the new world the characteristic unit will be small, highly mobile, independent and intelligent.” Bedroom Community, its artists and its ethos, is precisely what he was talking about. We need more like them.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• God only knows
• Sam Amidon in Manchester

The recurrent pose 18

A photograph attributed to William von Gloeden which borrows the Flandrin pose as the photographer did with greater precision in his picture entitled Cain, included in the first post in this series. If there’s scepticism about the origin it’s only that many photographs attributed to von Gloeden are by his cousin Wilhelm von Plueschow. Wikimedia Commons now has a gallery of von Gloeden’s quasi-Classical studies of the boys (and occasionally, girls) of Taormina, Sicily, and there’s another gallery devoted to von Plueschow which includes his own less faithful Flandrin imitation.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

The Feminine Sphinx

Colette.

Work this week designing a CD of readings from Colette had me searching books for pictures of the author. Of the few I found this is the most interesting, one of several Colette portraits made by photographer Leopold Reutlinger and one of at least two from 1907 which Colette used to promote her Moulin Rouge pantomime, Rêve d’Égypte. (You can see another one here.) The Egyptian theme explains the sphinx pose and her costume but there’s no indication as to whether the pose was borrowed from Franz Stuck’s famous painting (below) or whether the resemblance is coincidental.

The Sphinx by Franz Stuck (1889).

Stuck produced two nearly identical paintings on this theme; the other version is here in a rather muddy copy. I like the frame design for this one which explains in pictures the secret of the famous riddle which the Sphinx asks of Oedipus, “Which creature goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three in the evening?” Stuck painted another sphinx picture three years earlier, The Kiss of the Sphinx, which portrays a less feminine and distinctly more rapacious hybrid.

Ida Rubenstein.

Colette was famously bisexual and so too was dancer Ida Rubenstein. In the same book as the Colette picture, there’s this photo of Ida recumbent in a sphinx-like pose in a very exotic boudoir. Photographs such as these are the material connection between the extravagances of the fin de siècle and the Decadent strain of early cinema in works such as Cabiria (written by Ida Rubenstein’s friend Gabriele D’Annunzio), Intolerance and (of course) Alla Nazimova’s Salomé.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Heidi Taillefer
• Dorian Gray revisited
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• The art of Giulio Aristide Sartorio, 1860–1932

Victorian erotica: the original cheeky girls

Victorian erotica: the original cheeky girls
| Porn for Telegraph readers.

Czanara: The Art & Photographs of Raymond Carrance

Untitled photo print.

A fantastic exhibition of photographs, drawings and engravings by Raymond Carrance, aka Czanara, opens today at Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art, New York, running until June 21, 2008. For those of us who can’t get to see it there’s a selection of the works on show at their site which immediately increases the web visibility of this artist by several orders of magnitude.

Carrance was a photographer and book illustrator who, working mostly in the 1950’s and 60’s, created a private body of homoerotic dreamscape’s under the pseudonym ‘Czanara’. The exhibit shines new light on Carrance’s art, which is certainly courageous and innovative, especially for its time.

One of the last great unknown erotic artists of the 20th century, his work is somewhat reminiscent of the magic realism style of the painters Paul Cadmus and Jared French, yet done in a photographic medium. Using overlays of abstract graphics over dreamy images of languid young men at play, his work is a meditative pondering of the artist’s psyche. The work is reverential, distinctly European, yet never exploitative.

Carrance, who lived from 1921–1998, was also responsible for illustrating with elaborate etchings and lithographs the works of Jules Renard and Cyrano de Bergerac, as well as an edition of Henry de Montherlant’s 1951 gay classic La Ville dont Le Prince est un Enfant (The Land Whose King is a Child). There will be examples of this riveting work, as well as his compelling drawings, on view as well. Having died with no heirs, his work was sold at auction by the French state, but luckily fell into the hands of a bookseller who we have to thank for it finally seeing the light of day.

Untitled engraving (c. 1950s).

Among the items worthy of note is the above engraving which is another version of the hermaphrodite angel picture I posted in March last year. The other engravings are equally fascinating, looking at times like gay equivalents of Hans Bellmer.

May 4, 1953.

There’s also the drawing above which raises a curious artistic conundrum by being very reminiscent of the work of comic artist Burne Hogarth. A couple of weeks after posting the Czanara angel picture I pointed out the similarity between the film poster for Premonition and one of Hogarth’s panels from Jungle Tales of Tarzan, both of which use the trick of making faces out of tree branches. (I also noted that Dalí was doing similar things before almost everyone else.) Czanara’s 1953 drawing not only contains very Hogarthesque figures but does the same thing with the branches to make a skull face. The curious thing here is that Czanara’s picture predates Hogarth’s Tarzan book by more than twenty years. It’s very unlikely that Hogarth would have seen Czanara’s work; given that Hogarth was made world famous by his Tarzan strips of the 1940s it’s more likely that Czanara knew Hogarth’s work although none of his Sunday strips contained these kind of pictorial tricks and I’ve not seen any example of Hogarth doing this in the 1950s. I also haven’t yet seen the recent book about Czanara so can’t say what light has been shed on his artistic influences. If anyone can solve this mystery (which may simply be coincidence, of course), please leave a note in the comments.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The skull beneath the skin
• A premonition of Premonition
• Czanara’s Hermaphrodite Angel
• The art of Paul Cadmus, 1904–1999