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Weekend links 86

Salammbô by Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt) from Harry Crosby‘s Red Skeletons (1927). Dover published a new collection of Alastair’s drawings in September.

“A Taste of Honey showed working-class women from a working-class woman’s point of view, had a gay man as a central and sympathetic figure, and a black character who was neither idealised nor a racial stereotype.” RIP Shelagh Delaney. Related: Shelagh Delaney’s Salford (1960), directed by Ken Russell, and all 47 minutes (!) of The White Bus (1967), Lindsay Anderson’s strange, pre-If…. short, written by Shelagh Delaney, filmed in and around Manchester.

Since birth I’ve craved all things psychedelic, the energy and beauty of it. The pleasure… […] But in the US the exploration of consciousness and its powers—or really any curiosity about anything at all—is actively discouraged, because the system is so corrupt that it depends on people being virtually unconscious all the time. Burroughs cracked that code long ago. Spirituality here equals money; no one seems to be able to think, never mind explore their own consciousness.

Laurie Weeks: Making Magic Out of the Real

• Ian Albinson shows us The Title Design of Saul Bass while Ace Jet 170 has a copy of the new Bass monograph.

• Kris Kool (1970) at 50 Watts, Philip Caza’s lurid, erotic, psychedelic comic strip.

Götz Krafft by EM Lilien from a collection at Flickr.

• Serious Listeners: The Strange and Frightening World of Coil.

• The Octopus Chronicles, a new blog at Scientific American.

• We now live in a world where there are Ghost Box badges.

• Kilian Eng interviewed at Sci-Fi-O-Rama.

• Dalí Planet

• Bedabbled!

• A Taste of Honey (1962) by Acker Bilk | A Taste of Honey (1965) by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass | A Taste of Honey (Moog version) (1969) by Martin Denny.

A London Street Scene

A London Street Scene (1840) by John Parry.

If any painting requires the attentions of the Google Art Project it’s this depiction of a bill poster going about his work by John Orlando Parry (1810–1879). I know this from a cropped view (see here) which shows the care Parry applied to details of typography and the layering of the posters. There’s also some humour with the pickpocket boy on the left, and the artist himself as the subject of one poster in the centre of the picture. Wikipedia has a large version here but it’s too washed-out and blurred to be any use. For a view of the genuine article at work, see this LSE Library photo.

A note about the painting’s date: online sources give 1830 but the copy I have in a book from the V&A says 1840.

Watercolour ruins

Approach of the simoom—desert of Gizeh.

The paintings are by Scottish artist David Roberts (1796–1864) from two collections of prints of the Middle East, The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia (1842–1845) and Egypt and Nubia (1846–1849). These are a small sample from many more at the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs archive, and as representations of places that most of the original viewers would never otherwise see they hold up very well beside photos of the same locations. (See this earlier post for photos of Thebes and Kom Ombo a few decades later.) I always enjoy old book illustrations of the Baalbec temple entrance for the way artists seldom resist doing the Piranesi trick of exaggerating its scale, the better to make its perilous keystone seem all the more precariously poised. The doorway is taller today (having been excavated) but less of a threat.

Baalbec, May 7th, 1839.

Statues of Memnon at Thebes, during the inundation.

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Ver Sacrum, 1903

Concluding the series of posts about Ver Sacrum, the art journal of the Viennese Secession. The volume of issues for 1903 continues the bi-monthly format from the previous year only this time the calendar supplement is at the end of the volume. This was the last year for the journal, unfortunately, not least because the Secession had run its course, having perhaps proved its point in providing an alternative to the prevailing trends in Austrian art and design. Koloman Moser, Alfred Roller and Josef Hoffmann left to found the Wiener Werkstätte while Gustav Klimt, who again has an issue devoted to his drawings, went on to paint some of his most famous pictures, including The Kiss.

Ver Sacrum certainly ended on a high note. Most of the issues for 1903 contain woodcuts by a variety of artists with some superb examples of the form. For once there’s work by women—Irma von Dutczynska, Nora Exner and Hilde Exner—there’s more strange art from Marcus Behmer, and also a translated extract from the memorial book written by Arthur Symons following Aubrey Beardsley’s death in 1898. As before, anyone wishing to see more can browse all 498 pages or download the entire volume here.

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Pogány’s Turkish fairy tales

The illustrations are by Willy Pogány, the forty-four fairy tales were collected and translated by Ignácz Kunos. This wasn’t the first edition of Kunos’s book which dates back to 1889, but Pogány’s edition must be one of the most heavily illustrated, with drawings in a variety of styles throughout. The tipped-in plates look like woodcuts which is a style I’ve not seen from Pogány before. Elsewhere there are many comic demons and monsters rather like the kinds of things Sidney Sime used to enjoy inventing. And many Orientalist motifs, of course The Internet Archive copy isn’t dated but other sites give a date of 1913. This copy is also poorly hand-painted in places. Sacred Texts has the illustrations sans daubings.

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