Harry Clarke – Page 10 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 26

The interior of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County “Old Main” Building, 1874. Reblogged over the past few days on numerous Tumblr postings, none of whom had bothered to find out any details about the picture. I’m with Silent Porn Star on the contextless reblogging issue.

• Keith Richards et Mick Jagger à Londres, TV interviews with the Glimmer Twins from 1968 with some remarkable footage in the second half of Jagger filming the penultimate shot of Performance. That French video site requires further exploration. Also there is a short film from 1961 with Jacques Lasry demonstrating the Cristal Baschet. Related: Jacques Doyen & Jacques Lasry play their Cristals while Arlette Thomas and others read French poetry. I wrote something about the mystery of the Cristal two years ago this week.

• Two great album cover blogs from Jive Time Records: Project Thirty-Three is “a shrine to circles, dots, squares, rectangles and triangles, and the designers that make them come to life on album covers” while Groove Is In The Art “celebrates the era when psychedelic graphics and pop art met the mainstream”.

• At A Journey Round My Skull: Night Hallucinations: illustrations by Jaroslav Šerých for Tales of the Uncanny (Prague, 1976); Snark, Strangeness and Charm, Mahendra Singh’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll and others.

Laurence Chaves illustrates De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• Austin Osman Spare: Fallen Visionary at the Cuming Museum, Southwark, London in September, “will be the largest showcase of [Spare’s] work in a public museum since his death in 1956.” Jerusalem Press are publishing an expensive monograph to accompany the exhibition.

• Freeing “Pale Fire” From Pale Fire; “the next big Nabokov controversy”. Probably not but the thesis is an interesting one.

• Quintessential ‘topiary’ in Gandalf’s Garden: Barney Bubbles, head shops and Op Art graphic design.

• Monster Brains discovered some more paintings by Thomas Häfner.

• Spaceweather’s Northern Lights gallery.

• The passion of Krzysztof Penderecki.

• More Bookshelf porn.

• White peacocks.

• Sussan Deyhim: Daylaman | Desert Equations (for Brion Gysin) (with Richard Horowitz) | An interview at WorldStreams.

Several links this week via Adrian Shaughnessy’s Twitter feed. Thanks!

Strangest Genius: The Stained Glass of Harry Clarke

I mentioned Harry Clarke’s stained glass work last year since Flickr now has some decent photos of Clarke’s incredible window designs. Published this month is Strangest Genius: The Stained Glass of Harry Clarke by Lucy Costigan and Michael Cullen, the first proper book-length study of the windows and other stained glass work produced by the Clarke studio. It’s costly but then this is a unique book showcasing the entirety of the artist’s work in the medium. Further details here.

Harry Clarke posing as Christ in his studio.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Joseph Cavalieri’s stained glass
• Harry Clarke’s stained glass
• Poe at 200
• IKO stained glass
• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

Robert Anning Bell’s Tempest

British artist and designer Robert Anning Bell (1863–1933) illustrates Shakespeare in this 1901 edition at the Internet Archive and the work seemed to give him an excuse to embellish many of the pages with writhing mer-folk. His adaptation isn’t as striking as William Heath Robinson’s Midsummer Night’s Dream from 1914 but then few books are. In style Bell is closer to his contemporary Charles Ricketts with very open line work and no heavy black areas. Ricketts produced his own version of Ariel’s Song to Ferdinand for The Magazine of Art in 1895 but doesn’t seem to have illustrated much more of The Tempest as far as I’m aware, although his Vale Press did issue an edition of Shakespeare’s complete works. It hadn’t occurred to me before how few illustrated editions there are of The Tempest; this seems surprising given the fantastic nature of the story. It might be that illustrated plays have never sold so well despite there having been a number of illustrated Midsummer Night’s Dreams. I’d love to have seen Harry Clarke tackling Ariel and Caliban.

Also at the Internet Archive is a 1902 edition of Shelley’s poems illustrated by Bell (above) and an 1897 edition of Keats in the same series (below). Great poetry doesn’t necessarily lend itself to illustration so it’s no surprise that these books are less interesting than the Shakespeare.

Bell later reworked his illustration for Keats’s Ode to Psyche as a painting which he called Cupid’s Visit. I much prefer the drawing to the painting.

Cupid’s Visit (1912).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Charles Ricketts’ Hero and Leander
• Another Midsummer Night
• Arthur Rackham’s Midsummer Night’s Dream
• The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937
• William Heath Robinson’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

Joseph Cavalieri’s stained glass

The Good Ship Ménage À Trois (2008).

New York artist Joseph Cavalieri‘s stained glass work using Simpsons characters received a flurry of blogospheric attention recently. Of more interest for me is his gay-themed panels like the one above which show a different approach to the medium from that taken by Diego Tolomelli.

Gormenghast (2009).

And since I happen to be re-reading Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy at the moment, this panel was especially noteworthy. See the full piece here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mervyn Peake at Maison d’Ailleurs
• Harry Clarke’s stained glass
• IKO stained glass

Wildeana

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1907).

I finished reading Neil McKenna’s excellent biography recently, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, a book which makes an ideal companion to Richard Ellmann’s 1987 life of Wilde. Whilst reading about the two trials I remembered that among five pages of digitised Wilde volumes at the Internet Archive there’s a 1906 book, The Trial of Oscar Wilde: From the Shorthand Reports whose contents are what you’d expect from the title. Browsing through the other files there revealed further items of note such as this edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol published a year later and illustrated throughout by J Latimer Wilson. The page layout of text plus a narrow picture is uncommon, and from the date of publication it’s interesting to see that despite Wilde’s shattered reputation there was still money to be made printing his books.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1907).

Among the other volumes are two finely illustrated editions of his short stories. The edition of A House of Pomegranates below comes with drawings by Ben Kutcher, an artist about whom I know nothing other than his style is very similar to that of the great Harry Clarke. The introduction is a surprise, a serious appraisal of Wilde’s life by HL Mencken who admired the way the author stood against the prevailing morality of the day. There’s also an edition of The Happy Prince and Other Tales from 1920 illustrated by Charles Robinson.

The House of Pomegranates (1918).

These books are mainly of note for their decoration, however. Of more interest to Wilde enthusiasts is a first edition of Robert Hichens’ The Green Carnation from 1894. Hichens was a friend of Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas and, according to McKenna’s book, a fellow Uranian (ie: gay) who knew the pair well enough to be able to pen a scandalous roman à clef based on their relationship, helping to confirm for public opinion much that was suspected about Wilde’s outrageous lifestyle. Both Wilde and Douglas disowned Hichens and repudiated the novel but, coming a year before the Queensbury libel trial, it did neither of them any favours. Those curious to read the exploits of “Esmé Amarinth” and “Lord Reginald Hastings” may download a copy here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive