Oscar Wilde – Page 13 – { feuilleton }

Several more Salomés

Cover of Salome by Oscar Wilde (1903) by Modest Alexandrovich Durnov.

Gathering a few more Salomé renderings which have caught my attention recently. The biggest surprise is the one from Picabia since he’s an artist who these days is almost always associated with the Cubists and Dadaists. In the 1920s he returned to figurative painting and produced a number of pieces in this style. The overlaying of images reminds me of some of Hans Bellmer’s drawings.

Michael Zulli is an American comic artist whose work I’ve always liked a great deal. No information about his drawing, unfortunately, so I can’t say whether it’s a one-off or part of a larger project.

Salomé (1917) by John Riley Wilmer.

Salomé (c. 1928) by Francis Picabia.

Salomé Sphinx (1928) by Nicholas Kalmakoff.

Salomé (no date) by Michael Zulli.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive

Le Cantique des Cantiques

An oddity from the career of František Kupka, Le Cantique des Cantiques (1905) in this version is a stage presentation of the Song of Solomon by Jean de Bonnefon. Kupka provided a series of illustrations in a style similar to his Symbolist paintings which in the original printing are decorated with coloured borders. The copies here are from a bad scan at Gallica whose page I’ve been unable to find again. For the moment there are better copies to be seen at eBay. The drama is very much oriented towards the sexual exotica which Oscar Wilde had rendered notorious in Salomé, and which underpins so many of the obsessions of the period. A few years after this Kupka was in a different world entirely, following new directions into abstract art.

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Weekend links 154

Collage by Chloé Poizat.

• Xenis Emputae Travelling Band plays the Music of John Dee, and free at Bandcamp: Victorian Machine Music by Plinth, the “creaking, winding, piping, chiming and wood-knocking of Victorian parlour music machines”.

• Jeremy Willard on Mikhail Kuzmin, “the Oscar Wilde of Russia”. Related: Conner Habib on the Disinfo podcast discussing pornography, sexuality, and whether sex be a revolutionary act.

• Ed Vulliamy paid a visit to Hawkwind’s Hawkeaster festival. The Hawks’ Warrior On The Edge Of Time album is released in a remastered edition next month.

• Blasts from the past: Mahavishnu Orchestra, live in France, August 23rd, 1972, and Ashra (Manuel Göttsching & Lutz Ulbrich) in Barcelona, 1981.

An illustration by Alberto Martini for Raw Edges (1908) by Perceval Landon.

• NASA’s cover designs for Space Program manuals, guidebooks, press kits, reports and brochures.

• PingMag—”Art, Design, Life – from Japan”—makes a welcome return as an active blog.

• Suzanne Treister‘s Hexen 2.0 Tarot designs.

• Listening to records that no longer exist

• The architectural origins of the chess set

• The Bohemian Realm of Absinthiana

• Les sources d’une île: a Tumblr

• Hammer Without A Master (1998) by Broadcast | Test Area (1999) by Broadcast | Make My Sleep His Song (2009) by Broadcast & The Focus Group

Wildeana 9

Dorian Gray (1968) by Jim Dine; one of a series of prints for an illustrated edition. Rainbows didn’t become a gay symbol until Gilbert Baker’s flag design ten years later.

Continuing an occasional series.

• “…the Public is a very curious thing; it is sometimes perverse, and even obstinate, and it has evidently made up its mind to like the plays of Mr. Oscar Wilde.” Callum at Front Free Endpaper found a sceptical review of The Importance of Being Earnest in The Sketch for 20th February, 1895.

• “Wilde’s vision of Socialism, which at that date was probably shared by many people less articulate than himself, is Utopian and anarchistic.” George Orwell, writing in 1948, looks back at Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism.

• Oscar Wilde between Paris and Brighton: Research at the excellent Charles Ricketts & Charles Shannon blog following Wilde’s travels in the early months of 1891.

• Wilde Ride by Anthony Paletta: “Oscar Wilde spent a year in the US and met the likes of Walt Whitman and Henry James.”

• There’s plenty of Wildeana at Pinterest.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive

The art of Henri Caruchet

Byblis (1901) by Pierre Louÿs.

Henri Caruchet isn’t in George Barbier’s league, never mind that of Alphonse Mucha whose graphic style Caruchet appropriated. I’ve not been able to find details about his life either, all that turns up is examples of his book illustration on various websites. Author Pierre Louÿs is notable for his erotic works but it’s Caruchet’s illustrations for Jean de Villiot (via this site) which travel the furthest in that direction (see below), including another example of that deviant sub-genre, the woman being mauled by an octopus. If Caruchet had been a better draughtsman his illustrations might not have languished for so long.

There’s more decorative illustration by Caruchet at Gutenberg.org with an edition of Théophile Gautier’s Émaux et Camées. Two of Gautier’s poems from that volume are quoted by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Byblis (1901) by Pierre Louÿs.

Les Litanies de la Mer (1903) by Jean Richepin.

Parisienne et Peaux-Rouges (1904) by Jean de Villiot.

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