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Cocteau drawings

Some of the drawings by Jean Cocteau that comprise a new exhibition at Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art, Lambertville, New Jersey. A third of these are untitled pencil drawings from the 1950s that look like unused illustrations from the first edition of Genet’s Querelle de Brest (1947): matelots posing in various states of undress, masturbating or having sex. Among the other works there are several lithographs in the Cocteau-does-Picasso style. Everything is for sale but no prices are listed on the website.

Les Amoureux (1956).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Querelle de Brest
• Halsman and Cocteau
• La Belle et la Bête posters
• The writhing on the wall
• Le livre blanc by Jean Cocteau
• Cocteau’s sword
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• Cocteau at the Louvre des Antiquaires
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau

Owls and flowers

1: The pattern

A plate design by Christopher Dresser.

2: A novel by Alan Garner

The Owl Service (1967). Cover design by Kenneth Farnhill.

3: A Granada TV serial

The Owl Service (1969). Eight episodes, written by Alan Garner, directed by Peter Plummer.

4: A diversion

Chapter 8 of The Owl Service.

Gillian Hills as Alison in The Owl Service.

Gillian Hills (left) as Sonietta in A Clockwork Orange (1971).

5: A single by Pram

The Owl Service (2000) by Pram. Cover art by Mary Jo Bole.

6: Ghost Box

The Owl’s Map (2006) by Belbury Poly. Design by Julian House.

Track 1: Owls And Flowers

As The Crow Flies (2011) by The Advisory Circle. Design by Julian House.

Track 11: Learning Owl Reappears

7: A group

The Owl Service.

8: A Folio Society edition

The Owl Service (2013) by Alan Garner, illustrated by Darren Hopes.

9: Twelve audiological pathways

In Every Mind: Transmission Resonances, Volume 1 (2015) by A Year In The Country.

Transmission Resonances: Volume 1 takes as its wellhead the continuing reverberations of the 1969 cathode ray version of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service.

It pushes open the attic door from whence the scratching descends and travels to places that surprised, intrigued and even delighted our good selves when it was being shaped on our own particular audiological potters wheels.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• To Kill a King by Alan Garner
• Red Shift by Alan Garner

Laurence Housman’s The Sensitive Plant

Shelley’s The Sensitive Plant is a lengthy poem written after the death of Percy and Mary Shelley’s first child. Laurence Housman illustrates the sombre garden scenes in a minutely detailed manner, and manages to incorporate some concerns of his own. Pan isn’t mentioned in the poem but Housman adds a Pan figure which he describes in a note as “the garden deity”, and a symbol of nature untamed.

Continue reading “Laurence Housman’s The Sensitive Plant”

Laurence Housman’s End of Elfintown

More Laurence Housman, and a book I’d not seen before. Jane Barlow’s The End of Elfintown (1894) is a typical piece of Victorian fairy poetry—her “elves” are also flower-dwelling “Fays”, and Oberon is mentioned—but Housman’s renderings give a very different impression. In place of the usual delicate creatures he shows a very sensual company, all satyr ears and enormous Pre-Raphaelite manes. The frontispiece is very Beardsley-like, especially those entwined roses.

Continue reading “Laurence Housman’s End of Elfintown”

The Reflected Faun

Another one to add to the stock of fauns, satyrs and Pan figures that proliferate from the 1890s to the 1920s, Laurence Housman’s The Reflected Faun appeared in The Yellow Book in 1894. The magazine’s publisher, John Lane, also published Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan in the same year although an early version of Machen’s story had appeared a few years before. What’s notable about Housman’s drawing is the way he combines in a single image several distinct themes: Faunus/Pan, the reflected Narcissus, and all those tales of beguiling spirits lurking in water. The nature of the spirit in this picture is distinctly androgynous, a detail that wouldn’t have impressed those critics who considered The Yellow Book to be an unwholesome publication. The androgyny may be taken as deliberate: Housman was one of London’s “Uranian” artists, and a few years later joined George Cecil Ives’ Order of Chaeronea, a secret society for gay men and lesbians. In the light of this, the drawing might be interpreted as a symbol for a clandestine existence where true desires remain buried or submerged.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aubrey Beardsley’s Keynotes
• In the Key of Yellow
• Ads for The Yellow Book
• The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
• The Great God Pan
• Peake’s Pan