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Carl Larsson’s Angel of Death

I’ve known the work of Swedish artist Carl Larsson (1853–1919) for many years via a collection of drawings and paintings of the artist’s family and home life, light works created between bouts of more serious painting. The interiors in the At Home series are especially good, meticulously rendered watercolours which today resemble the kinds of delineations found in Continental comic books. Less familiar is the work Larsson created prior to these drawings.

Dödens Engel (The Angel of the Death) is a book-length religious poem by Johan Olof Wallin inspired by the cholera epidemic of the 1830s, the same epidemic that Poe writes about in The Sphinx. Larsson illustrates every page of this edition from 1880, deploying the full range of traditional death symbolism: skulls, hourglasses, scythes, extinguished torches and so on.The sombre imagery makes a striking contrast with the pictures of Larsson’s home life yet the painting for which he hoped to be remembered, Midvinterblot (1915), is equally doom-laden, a huge canvas that depicts a king preparing to sacrifice himself to spare his people from famine.

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Weekend links 397

Nocturnal Rome — Trajan’s Column (1934) by MC Escher.

• Many eulogies this week for the late, great Mark E Smith. Strangers to the abrasive splendour of The Fall could do worse than begin with Geeta Dayal‘s list of ten best albums. At YouTube there’s a playlist of The Fall’s Peel Sessions, from 1978 to 2004, while The Fall Quote Generator provides fragments of lyrics and interviews. “Use it like the I Ching.”

• Books with poisoned pages are usually the stuff of fiction but Shadows from the Walls of Death: Facts and Inferences Prefacing a Book of Specimens of Arsenical Wall Papers (1874) by RC Kedzie presents a serious health hazard to would-be readers.

• Man Ray: “There was more surrealism rampant in Hollywood than all the surrealists could invent in a lifetime.” Kimberly Lindbergs looks at Albert Lewin’s 1951 fantasy, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.

• At Towleroad: “The Most Dangerous Gay Man In America Fought Violence with Violence” Eric Markowitz on the Reverend Raymond Broshears, founder in 1973 of the Lavender Panthers.

• Coming in April from Strange Attractor: All in the Downs: Reflections on Life, Landscape and Song by Shirley Collins.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 244 by Daniel O’Sullivan, and XLR8R Podcast 526 by Jamaica Suk.

• At Dennis Cooper‘s this week, a post I might have made myself (but, er, didn’t) about mirrored works of art.

• A preview of Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music and the Year Sci-Fi Exploded by Jason Heller.

• “We live in Philip K Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s,” says Henry Farrell.

• Was For Your Convenience (1937) by Paul Pry the first queer city guide?

• Fall (1967) by Miles Davis | Fall (2011) by The Haxan Cloak | Fall (2014) by The Bug feat. Inga Copeland

The Mystery of Picasso

I mentioned late last year that I’d written the booklet notes for a forthcoming DVD/blu-ray of The Mystery of Picasso (1956) by Henri-Georges Clouzot, a film receiving its blu-ray premiere this month courtesy of Arrow Academy. The discs are now on sale (UK only, I’m afraid) either online or anywhere that stocks Arrow titles. (Fopp is my preferred outlet.) For those outside the UK, the restored film is also available on iTunes. Clouzot’s film was regarded as an oddity in the 1950s, the director being best known for outstanding thrillers like The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques. Today The Mystery of Picasso is regarded as one of the great films about art for the way it successfully captures Picasso in a decade when he was still fervently productive, despite being in his 70s.

Almost all films of this type favour the documentary approach, usually with a camera and interviewer dogging the subject’s footsteps while showing little of the creative process. Picasso wouldn’t have participated in anything like this—he was appalled by a documentary he saw about Matisse—but Clouzot persuaded him that a film could be made showing him drawing and painting in a studio environment. This approach had precedence in Paul Haessarts’ short film from 1949 (included among the disc extras) which showed Picasso in his studio at Vallauris; the film ends with a series of paintings on glass of various animals and human figures. Clouzot expanded on Haessarts’ idea with the full range of film technology: time-lapse, black-and-white stock, colour stock and Cinemascope. The works Picasso creates for the camera aren’t his best—how could they be when they were being produced at speed in sweltering, time-constrained conditions? But the film is a miraculous portrait of an artist whose name is still universally recognised almost fifty years after his death. By chance or design, it’s also a partial portrait of Clouzot himself who appears in several of the shots to discuss new camera setups.

There’s no need for me to say more about the film when I discuss it at length in the booklet. For a review of the disc contents, there’s a substantial appraisal here. For more about Henri-Georges Clouzot I recommend the study by Christopher Lloyd which was invaluable for its details about the film’s production.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Picasso-esque
• My pastiches
• Cubist Cthulhu

Weekend links 396

Cover art for Outer Dark (1994) by Bill Laswell. Photography by Thi-Linh Le.

• “In an era where music, among other creative endeavors, has been devalued as mere ‘content,’ freely accessed through the new digital medium, the very survival of those who create music and art and culture has been threatened. Bassist, iconic producer, and sonic visionary Bill Laswell becomes the latest legendary talent to fall victim to the vagaries of these crazy times. Beset by health problems while trying to navigate this harsh and uncertain economic landscape, Laswell is struggling to maintain Orange Music, the legendary New Jersey studio that he as helmed for the last 20 years. He is putting the call out to all fans, friends, and fellow artists alike: If you can help, please do so now. No contribution is too small.”

• A Perspex Town is a video by Ian Hodgson (aka Moon Wiring Club) for Applied Music Vol.2: Plastics Today, a new album by Jon Brooks (aka The Advisory Circle).

• The strangeness in the land: Adam Scovell on the BBC’s Play for Today adaptation of Red Shift by Alan Garner. I’d recommend reading the novel as well.

• “My last album was pretty perfect,” says Scott Walker. Sundog, a book of his lyrics, is out now from Faber.

• Popular Graphic Arts at the Library of Congress, a new resource of free-to-use, high-resolution scans.

• At The Quietus: LoneLady & Stephen Mallinder offer playlists of music they’ve enjoyed recently.

• Another Green World: Lewis Gordon on how Japanese ambient music found a new audience.

• The discography of Drew Mullholland (aka Mount Vernon Arts Lab) is now at Bandcamp.

• Mixes of the week: FACT mix 635 by Riobamba, XLR8R Podcast 526 by DJ Sports.

• The occult roots of higher dimensional research in physics.

• Animated Britain: a YouTube playlist from the BFI.

• Pye Corner Audio remixes Knightstown.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: John Waters Day.

• A World Of Different Dimensions (1979) by Tomita | Into The Fourth Dimension (Essenes In Starlight) (1991) by The Orb | New Dimensions In (2010) by The Advisory Circle

The Demons of King Solomon

Abyzou.

Presenting my illustrations for The Demons of King Solomon, a horror anthology edited by Aaron French. This is a follow up to Aaron’s The Gods of HP Lovecraft which was published by JournalStone in 2015. I did 6 illustrations for the Lovecraft volume, covering half the stories whereas the new book has illustrations of mine for every story.

Agaras.

The brief for the authors this time was to write a story incorporating a Solomonic demon of their choosing. There are many of these, from the ones described in the Testament of Solomon to the 72 listed in the Ars Goetia (or Lesser Key of Solomon), the latter being familiar to many people via their often comical depictions in De Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal. My original intention for the illustrations was to do a series of pictures based on each story. Some of the stories were late in arriving, however, and I only had a month free for the work so I changed the plan to a series of depictions of the demons as they’re described in the grimoires. This makes more sense when many of the stories have the demons masquerading in human guise, so the illustrations not only show something new but also act as a connection back to their infernal history. Agaras (or Agares), for example, is described by the grimoires as an old man riding a crocodile with a hawk on his arm. Most of the seals on each picture are taken from the ones for the demons shown in the Ars Goetia. Not all the demons in the anthology are listed there so I had to invent a few seals to fill out the collection. I’ll let people guess which are genuine and which are inventions. The Demons of King Solomon is out now from JournalStone. Larger copies of the illustrations may be seen here.

Amdusias.

Asmodeus.

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