Dorothea Tanning – { feuilleton }

The 7 Spectral Perils of Dorothea Tanning

I like a picture series, and this is one I hadn’t encountered before. Dorothea Tanning’s Les 7 périls spectraux (1950) is a portfolio of seven lithograph prints with accompanying text, “Pourquoi Rester Muets?”, by André Pieyre de Mandiargues. Of the series, the artist had this to say:

My first lithograph adventure has become a book. An album with seven perils in it. Because to the seven deadly sins I preferred the seven spectral perils, life being more perilous than sinful.

What we don’t have—or I’ve been unable to find—is a list of perils to go with their respective prints. I’d guess, therefore, that with the perils being replacements for sins there’s a correspondence with the traditional prescriptive list, although this still leaves us to guess which is which. The print that shows a sunflower framed by a knife and fork may be allied to gluttony or it may refer to something entirely different, sunflowers being a recurrent, often enigmatic, feature of Tanning’s paintings.

First Peril.

There’s a further correspondence with Une Semaine de Bonté, the collage novel created by Tanning’s husband, Max Ernst, in the 1930s. Ernst’s “Week of Kindness” comprises seven days, each of which is assigned a “capital element”, only in Ernst’s scheme we have a definite list of elements: mud, water, fire, blood, blackness, sight, and “unknown”. Since Tanning’s perils may also refer to a private mythology we’ll have to assign them to “unknown” as well, unless further information comes to light.

Second Peril.

Third Peril.

Fourth Peril.

Fifth Peril.

Sixth Peril.

Seventh Peril.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Temptations
• 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements
• Max and Dorothea
• Dorothea Tanning, 1910–2012
• Dorothea Tanning: Early Designs for the Stage

Weekend links 712

Above and Below (1968) by Wendy Abbott.

• “Thirty-two years after the five Central Asian countries of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan appeared on the world map, little of the region has been portrayed in film. Countries associated with the -stan suffix are perceived as dangerous or sinister.” Komron Ergashev on Central Asia and cinema.

• Old music: Alice Coltrane’s Carnegie Hall concert from 1971 has been available for many years as a high-quality bootleg but never the complete recording. The first official release next month promises to at last present a full performance.

• RIP Damo Suzuki, vocalist for Can during the group’s peak years. The Rockpalast concert from 1970 captured the group in impressive form shortly after Suzuki joined.

• “I’ve always been drawn towards esoteric phenomena: the illogical, the inexpressible, the impossible.” Dorothea Tanning talking to Carlo McCormick in 1990.

• “This film was shot live on the surface of an 8mm² chemical reaction.” As Above by Roman Hill.

• New music: Floating On A Moment by Beth Gibbons, and All Life Long by Kali Malone.

• At Unquiet Things: The art of Kiyoshi Hasegawa.

• Joel Gion’s favourite music.

• Esoteric Circle (1976) by Jan Garbarek | As Above, So Below (1981) by Tom Tom Club | Esoteric Red (1997) by Tao

Weekend links 709

Guardian Angels (1946) by Dorothea Tanning.

• “If photographs can outlive their subjects, and memory works like photography, do images somehow endure in the brain after death? Could these undead memories be recovered with the right technologies?” Speculative fiction from 1899 in Dr Berkeley’s Discovery by Richard Slee and Cornelia Atwood Pratt.

• Mix of the week: Astral Loitering: Excursions In New Age, 1970–1989: 210 minutes of well-chosen selections that continue where I Am The Center left off. In a similar zone, albeit more recent, there’s the regular monthly report from Ambientblog, DreamScenes—January 2024.

• At American Scientist: The Source of Europe’s Mild Climate: “The notion that the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping Europe anomalously warm turns out to be a myth”. An article from 2006 that you’d think would be more widely known today.

• The Anomalist: “World News on UFOs, Bigfoot, the Paranormal, and Other Mysteries at the Edge of Science”. Too many of the links lead to worthless tabloid filler but the headlines can be fun.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Two-Headed Doctor: Listening for Ghosts in Dr John’s Gris-Gris, a book by David Toop which analyses the Doctor’s voodoo-themed debut album.

• At Unquiet Things: Beyond The Shadows Of The Labyrinth: Exploring the Groovy Kaleidoscope of Ted CoConis’ Art.

• DJ Food unearths a batch of Portuguese Hauntology via Prisma Sonora Records.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: John Waters Day (restored/expanded).

• New music: Moon by Retep Folo & Dorothy Moskowitz.

• New Age (live) (1969) by The Velvet Underground | New Age (1980) by Chrome | 1966 – Let The New Age Of Enlightenment Begin (2014) by Sinoia Caves

Max Ernst by Peter Schamoni

The English version of Peter Schamoni’s feature-length documentary from 1991 has finally reached YouTube. I think copyright reasons may have prevented it from doing so in the past in which case the usual caveats apply: if it’s of interest then watch it while you have the opportunity, it may not be there for long. The German version of the film has a longer title, Max Ernst: Mein Vagabundieren—Meine Unruhe, which auto-translates to “my vagabonding—my restlessness”, a reference to Ernst’s peripatetic life as well as to his artistic wanderings.

I mentioned in the previous post my having spent some time last year watching a number of documentaries about Surrealism. This was one of them, and it’s the film about Max Ernst. Films about Salvador Dalí are plentiful but other Surrealist artists are lucky if they receive a single worthwhile appraisal. Peter Schamoni had filmed Ernst in 1966 for a short, Maximiliana oder die widerrechtliche Ausübung der Astronomie, so was already sympathetic to the artist’s work. Max Ernst resembles one of the BBC’s classic Arena documentaries in being a biographical account threaded with documentary material and pictures of significant artworks. Detail is supplied by actors reading from writings by Ernst, Dorothea Tanning and others.

There’s a lot of interview footage here, mostly from TV appearances in later life, in which Ernst’s intelligent conversation makes a striking contrast to Dalí’s bluster and evasions. Schamoni interleaves the historical footage with shots of the various locations of Ernst’s wanderings: the south of France, New York City, California, Arizona, Paris. Several of the Dalí documentaries note the degree to which the coastal landscape of Cadaqués informed Dalí’s painting; Schamoni makes a similar comparison between Ernst’s American paintings and the desert landscapes of Arizona. It’s good to see some of the Microbes that he painted while he was there, a series of tiny landscape pictures that books about Ernst don’t always mention, let alone reproduce.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The nightingale echo
• Max Ernst’s favourites
• Viewing View
• Max Ernst album covers
• Maximiliana oder die widerrechtliche Ausübung der Astronomie
• Max and Dorothea
• Dreams That Money Can Buy
• La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier

Weekend links 537

“The dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet.” The Masque of the Red Death illustrated by Harry Clarke, 1919.

• 2020 is the year of enormous pink lady faces on book covers, apparently. As someone who spends little time following cover trends, the identification of a new variety of herd behaviour among designers or their art directors is always fascinating and bizarre.

• Tomoko Sauvage plays her porcelain and glass instruments inside a disused water tank in Berlin for a new album, Fischgeist. The Wire has previews.

• At The Paris Review: Craig Morgan Teicher on the later work of Dorothea Tanning, and Daniel Mendelsohn on the rings of Sebald.

Unlike many of the rapidly forgotten [Nobel] “winners”, and despite the occasional sniffy critic wondering “who still reads it?” Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet has never been out of print since he published it in 1957. The centenary of his birth in 2012 raised a flurry of revived interest in Durrell. Indeed the whole Durrell family has been popping up regularly in reprints of Lawrence’s novels and poetry, in his brother Gerald’s popular tales of his “family and other animals,” and in several TV series about their life in Greece on Corfu island in the late 1930s. A BBC interviewer once asked Lawrence about the difference between his writing and brother Gerald’s. He replied: “I write literature. My brother writes books that people read.”

I’ve read Gerald and I’ve read Lawrence; I prefer Lawrence, thank you. Thomas O’Dwyer examines the chef d’oeuvre of the elder Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

• Dark Entries shares Patrick Cowley’s cover of Chameleon by Herbie Hancock. The original is here.

• Saunas, sex clubs and street fights: how Sunil Gupta captured global gay life.

• Inside the Grace Jones exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary.

• Rob Walker on how dub reggae’s beats conquered 70s Britain.

• Who invented the newspaper? John Boardley reports.

• Spread The Virus (1981) by Cabaret Voltaire | Cut Virus (2003) by Bill Laswell | The Unexclusive Virus ~even our invincible religion “Technology” cannnot~ (2006) by Kashiwa Daisuke