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Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #15

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. This week there’s another jump in the running order, from volume 12 to 15, and it’s impossible to avoid feeling frustrated by this when some of the previous editions have been so good. Volume 15 covers the period from October 1904 to March 1905, and includes work by the Wiener Werkstätte whose rectilinear designs mark the transition from Art Nouveau to what would eventually be called Art Deco. There’s also another feature on the Glasgow Arts and Crafts movement based around Charles Rennie Mackintosh with a look at the designs for Hill House in Helensburgh, Scotland. As usual, anyone wishing to see these samples in greater detail is advised to download the entire volume at the Internet Archive. There’ll be more DK&D next week.

The peculiar Symbolist paintings of gay artist Sascha Schneider are featured once again, and typically for this artist there’s a profusion of male flesh on display.

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Elizabeth Taylor, 1932–2011

Remember her for her incomparable beauty, her great performances in great films, the camp confections like Cleopatra and Boom, and years of activism on behalf of gay people:

There is no gay agenda, it’s a human agenda. Why shouldn’t gay people be able to live as open and freely as everybody else? What it comes down to, ultimately, is love. How can anything bad come out of love? The bad stuff comes out of mistrust, misunderstanding and, God knows, from hate and from ignorance.

It would also be remiss of me (since no obituaries will be tasteless enough to mention it) if I didn’t note her presence at the heart of one of the more notorious novels of the past fifty years. I often used to wonder whether anyone had told her about Crash. Not that she’d want to know about it if they did; who would be eager to read detailed plans for their own horrific death? But it was her status as a 20th century icon, the nonpareil of film stardom, that made her the perfect choice as the focus of Vaughan’s obsessions in Ballard’s novel.

• Elizabeth Taylor: a career in clips
• RIP Elizabeth Taylor: A Ballardian Primer

Gothic details

Gargoyles, Notre Dame de Paris.

These aren’t all as old as they look, the gargoyles are part of Viollet-le-Duc’s 19th century restoration of Notre Dame, but the sepia tone makes them seem complementary. There’s a lot more at the Andrew White Architectural Photographs Collection at Luna Commons.

Wrought iron torch holder or horse tether from the Strozzi Palace by Benedetto da Maiano.

Flying buttresses, Reims Cathedral.

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

The Public Voice by Lejf Marcussen

Lejf Marcussen is a Danish filmmaker whose animation Den Offentlige Røst (The Public Voice, 1988) I know from UK TV screenings, back in the days when the TV channels here used to screen more than cookery shows and soap operas. This is a short Surrealist piece which begins with zoom into a Paul Delvaux painting then reverses the process by pulling back from a continually changing picture some of whose details can be seen here. It is, of course, better to watch the film than read a description of it which is why I kept hoping a copy might turn up on YouTube. Sure enough, a rough copy has been languishing there for two years so I suggest you watch it here while you have the chance. These obscure shorts have a habit of getting deleted, and this miniature marvel is more obscure than most.

Update: changed the link to a better quality version. Thanks, Martin!

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Patrick Bokanowski again
• L’Ange by Patrick Bokanowski
• The Hourglass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has
• Babobilicons by Daina Krumins
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
• Short films by Walerian Borowczyk
• The Brothers Quay on DVD

Thomas Mackenzie’s Aladdin

The tip for this one came via Beautiful Century. Thomas Mackenzie (1887–1944) was a minor British illustrator whose work I hadn’t seen before, and if I’d seen the picture above uncredited I might have taken it for something by Kay Nielsen or Edmund Dulac. Mackenzie’s colour plates for the 1919 edition of Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp in Rhyme by Arthur Ransome are very similar to his more famous contemporaries, while the black-and-white pieces owe a considerable debt to Aubrey Beardsley, especially the title page below. Not all the drawing is as assured as one might hope but the book as a whole is still worth a look.

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