{ feuilleton }

Fonthill Abbey

Views such as these are all we’ve ever have of Fonthill Abbey, a monstrous pile that would have been Britain’s most grandiose folly had it not collapsed in 1825. William Beckford (1760–1844) was the man responsible, among other things a very wealthy and bisexual writer whose Vathek (1786) is one of the better Gothic novels. The Gothic fad fuelled many such constructions, Horace Walpole having inaugurated the trend decades earlier at Strawberry Hill House. Fonthill always fascinates for that outrageously excessive octagonal tower which must have been visible for miles across Wiltshire. Plans and other views show that excess was also a factor elsewhere, especially in the vast hall. The pictures here are from Wikimedia Commons. There’s a book at the Internet Archive A Description of Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire (1812) by James Storer, a contemporary account describing the building in detail, and also Delineations of Fonthill Abbey (1823) by John Rutter.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Gothic details
• Schloss Falkenstein
• Pite’s West End folly
• Viollet-le-Duc

Jacques Brissot’s Hay Wain

The Hay Wain (1973) by Jacques Brissot.

Another post intended to encourage further investigation. Searching for Jacques Brissot’s art is a problem since the French artist (born 1929) gets confused with the French writer Jacques Pierre Brissot (1754–1793). Details about Brissot the artist are also scant:

Jacques Brissot lives and works in Paris. He began his career as a film maker (his movie Egypt O Egypt was selected as the official French entry for the Cannes Film Festival). Later, his unique form of artistic expression, a reinvention of the most dramatic masterpieces of the past through collage, relief, over-painting etc., led to his immense success as a visual artist. (more)

Anyone familiar with art history will recognise Brissot’s Hay Wain triptych as being a Surrealist updating of the Hieronymus Bosch triptych of the same name: a side-by-side comparison shows that many of the details are carefully matched. (In Brissot’s version Christ in the clouds appear to have been replaced by Sigmund Freud.) The copies here come from Temptation (1975) edited by David Larkin. In the same book there’s also a panel from Brissot’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1973). Judging by the works visible on auction sites Brissot has continued his meticulous collage work to the present day but there’s a surprising lack of attention outside the marketplace. Works such as this deserve to be seen in greater detail.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Jindrich Styrsky, 1899–1942
• Initiations in the Abyss: A Surrealist Apocalypse
• Vultures Await
• Wilfried Sätty: Artist of the occult
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty
• Metamorphosis Victorianus
• Max (The Birdman) Ernst
• Gandharva by Beaver & Krause
• Fantastic art from Pan Books
• The art of Stephen Aldrich

Le Grand Macabre

Yesterday I mentioned Leslie Megahey’s Ligeti film, All Clouds Are Clocks, an hour-long documentary based around an interview with György Ligeti filmed in 1976. A unique feature of that film was that Megahey returned to film Ligeti in the same room in 1991 where they discussed the composer’s work during the intervening period. Of these, Le Grand Macabre, written in the late 1970s, was the most ambitious piece.

Bartók and Ligeti share some attributes: both were Hungarian, and both were forced to flee their native country. Both composers also wrote only one opera apiece. Le Grand Macabre is Ligeti’s opus, an absurdist drama based on Michel de Ghelderode‘s 1934 play, La Balade du grand macabre. In the film Ligeti explains that he didn’t want to repeat the mid-century concept of the anti-opera but was also dissatisfied with the traditional variety, hence Le Grand Macabre‘s description as an “anti-anti-opera”, a work that combines the tradition and its reaction.

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Leslie Megahey’s Bluebeard

Back in the days when the BBC’s television output challenged its audience rather than pandered to it, Leslie Megahey was a name I always looked out for. During the 1970s and 80s, Megahey was one of the corporation’s outstanding producers and directors, and since his tastes often ran very close to mine seeing his name in a magazine listing was an alert for some essential viewing. Favourite Megahey documentaries would include his Omnibus film about (and interview with) György Ligeti in 1976, and the two-part Arena special about Orson Welles in 1982 that persuaded the director to talk at length for the first time about his career. Megahey’s arts films included drama documentaries about the French painters David and Gericault, and two dramas with painting themes, Cariani and the Courtesans (1987), and Schalcken the Painter (1979), the latter being an exceptional adaptation of the Sheridan Le Fanu ghost story. Duke Bluebeard’s Castle was one of the last of his BBC films, an adaptation of the Bartók opera that had this Bartók obsessive hopping with delight when it was screened in 1988.

Bluebeard and Judith.

Bartók’s only opera was written in 1911, and is easier to adapt than most, being a single act of an hour or so in length with only two performers, Bluebeard (bass) and Judith (soprano). Given this it’s surprising there haven’t been more filmed versions. I wrote something a while back about the seldom-seen Michael Powell version; then there’s a version from 1981 by Miklos Szinetár scored by the London Philharmonic Orchestra with Georg Solti conducting. Megahey’s film also features the London Philharmonic with Adam Fischer conducting. Robert Lloyd and Elizabeth Laurence are the performers.

The libretto by Béla Balázs turns the old fairy tale into a psychodrama that’s also one of the first post-Freud operas, with the audience being asked in the prologue “Where is the stage? Is it outside, or inside?” Judith is ushered into the castle by Bluebeard to find seven locked doors: her curiosity and her demands to discover what lies behind the doors (or inside the mind of her husband-to-be) seals her fate. In some of the fairy tale versions the brothers of the bride arrive at the last moment to rescue their sister; not so here.

Continue reading “Leslie Megahey’s Bluebeard”

Now we are six

Number Six/The Prisoner (1990?) by Roland Topor.

Welcome to post number 2,618, and the sixth anniversary of this here weblog. Roland Topor’s drawing could be interpreted as a cry for help from your narrator—imprisoned by the daily necessity to file copy—but it’s there mainly because I couldn’t think of another picture featuring the requisite numeral.

WordPress’s Site Stats shows that these pages had over 2,000,000 visits in the past year, something I find very surprising. Many will be from either regular readers or one-off hits from the Google hordes searching for a particular picture but all the same…that’s a lot of people. A large percentage are no doubt visitors to the gay artists archive which continues to be the most popular page here, and one I feel compelled to keep adding to as a result. There’s always more to discover.

As always, thanks for reading and commenting!

John x