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RS Sherriffs’ Tamburlaine the Great

I would have posted this by now if it hadn’t been for the recent unpleasantness. Robert Stewart Sherriffs (1906-60) was a Scottish artist who I confess I hadn’t come across before until Nick H (thanks, Nick!) drew my attention to this book at silver-gryph’s eBay pages. Sherriffs’ illustrated edtion of The Life and Death of Tamburlaine the Great by Christopher Marlowe was published in a limited edition in 1930.

The drawings are black-and-white throughout, and of such a quality you have to wonder why Dover or someone hasn’t done a reprint. The general approach owes much to the usual suspects, notably Aubrey Beardsley and Harry Clarke, but there’s a development of these earlier styles that you also find in the work of Ray Frederick Coyle and Beresford Egan. In addition to the full-page plates Sherriffs also provided a number of insect vignettes, the last of which is a Death’s-head Hawkmoth.

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May Wilson’s Snowflakes

Snowflake Series (Pink Netting) (1965).

Discovered yesterday whilst searching for May-related pictures, some pieces from the Snowflake collage series by American artist May Wilson (1905–1986). Wilson was a mail artist as well as a collagist whose Snowflake series draws attention for its deployment of photos from beefcake magazines of the 1960s. It’s a commonplace that women often enjoy seeing gay porn but this interest hasn’t been reflected so much in art made by women. Offhand I can only think of the aforementioned Sibylle Ruppert making use of photos made by men for men. May Wilson produced similar works using glamour photos of women so her interest wasn’t solely concerned with the male form.

Snowflake Collage (Male Nude in Woods) (1966).

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May

View of Fuji from Miho Bay, May (1830) by Utagawa Kunisada.

No weekend links this week, unfortunately. The past few days have been spent re-establishing some equilibrium following the technical upheavals of the previous weeks, including updating things on the old computer so it can be the main work machine until the new one is fixed. Consequently I’ve spent no time at all looking at blogs or reading RSS feeds.

Continuing the monthly post of month-related paintings, and May is a difficult month to search for when its name is also a woman’s name and a word that turns up in other contexts: the BBC’s Your Paintings website is rendered almost completely useless by the profusion of portraits of the nation’s mayors through the ages. As months go there’s an understandable emphasis on the blossoming of the natural world. Some examples are represented here, together with a few less obvious depictions.

A May Morning in Moret (1886) by Alfred Sisley.

La Belle Jardiniere: May (1896) by Eugène Grasset.

May Morn (1899) by John Henry Twachtman.

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The sphinx of Wolf City

Wolf City (1972) by Amon Düül II.

Behold another favourite album cover by a favourite band, one of several superb designs for Amon Düül II by Falk-U Rogner who was also the group’s keyboard player. Rogner’s suitably hallucinogenic cover images are worth a post of their own but this one requires attention today since I happened to solve the mystery of the location of the Düül sphinx during the recent hiatus.

Ever since I began these blog posts I’ve had a feeling that the endless trawling of image archives might one day turn up the location of this stone creature. It was only ever going to be something you’d find by accident, and that’s precisely what happened with the discovery of the drawing below in volume 4 of Materials and Documents of Architecture and Sculpture (1915) by A. Raguenet, a set of books I’ve been plundering recently for architectural details.

Compare with this photo.

The notes for the drawing offer enough information to trace the location to the Brunswick Monument in Geneva, a mausoleum built in 1879 for the Duke of Brunswick. The monument is a typically Gothic edifice guarded by a number of stone lions plus this splendid sphinx on a plinth by a pool of water. On the opposite side of the monument there’s a matching bird-headed sculpture. Amon Düül II were a German group so it was always likely that the sphinx would be in Europe somewhere, if not Germany itself. The photo below is a detail from this Flickr shot which is the best match I’ve found for the angle of the cover photo. Jean Franel was the monument architect but statues are often the work of specialist artists, and I’ve yet to find a name attached to these examples.

Photo by Till Westermayer.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Frémiet’s Lizard

Heimkiller and High

Heimkiller.

More Giger. Among the pre-Alien films, Passagen (1972), a documentary by FM Murer about the artist’s work, is the one I’d most like to see. That’s yet to appear online, however, so in the meantime here’s two shorts from 1967 which are the earliest entries in Giger’s filmography. Heimkiller is a brief study of Giger’s Blood-Glass sculpture which shows the piece in action and does little else. High is the first of several collaborations with director FM Murer, a black-and-white journey through the late Surrealism of Giger’s early works, some of which show a slight Dalí influence. I’ve always liked the drawings in his Shafts series, some of which can be seen here: views of plunging walls threaded with staircases that were derived from nightmares about a cellar stairway in his parents’ house.

High.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Man Who Paints Monsters In The Night
• Hans by Sibylle
• HR Giger album covers
• Giger’s Necronomicon
• Dan O’Bannon, 1946–2009
• Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune
• The monstrous tome