A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
I have a peacock-heavy piece of art out next month so with that grasping for spurious relevance here’s a few more peacock discoveries.
Antoine Helbert‘s untitled peacock man is one of a number of striking portraits turning humans into birds. Via Chateau Thombeau.
Peacock styles, Anchor Buggy Co. (1897) at the Library of Congress.
left: Mame (1974); right: Excalibur (1981).
Matthew Peak, son of film poster artist Bob Peak, left on a comment this week on an earlier post I made about his father’s art with news of the relaunch of the Peak site. I’m looking forward to seeing what gets posted there especially since the additions to date are such good quality. Peak was a tremendously powerful and dramatic artist whose posters are often a lot more engaging than the films they were intended to promote. He was also exceptionally versatile, as the two examples above demonstrate (via IMP Awards), being equally adept at hard-edged graphics as he was with nebulous airbrush paintings. As with the similarly versatile Richard Amsel, the more time passes, the more these posters seem evidence of an artistry and individuality which has vanished from the world of film design.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Aquirax Uno
• Alice in Acidland
• Salomé posters
• Polish posters: Freedom on the Fence
• Kaleidoscope: the switched-on thriller
• The Robing of The Birds
• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009
• Dallamano’s Dorian Gray
• Czech film posters
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters
A new production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé is touring the UK this month, a presentation of the Headlong company which will appear in a number of venues throughout the country but not in Manchester, unfortunately. My disappointment at this news prompted me by way of compensation to finally order a DVD of the Steven Berkoff production, a live performance filmed in Tokyo in 1992. I wish I’d done so sooner.
Herod (Steven Berkoff).
Berkoff’s production was first staged at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 1988. The play’s success led to a run at the National Theatre in London (with a Beardsley-derived poster) followed by performances worldwide. I don’t know how significant the original choice of venue was but the Gate Theatre was founded by Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards in 1928. MacLiammóir was a great Wilde enthusiast whose one-man portrait of the writer, The Importance of Being Oscar, achieved considerable success in the 1960s. He would have relished Berkoff’s production.
Salomé (Myriam Cyr).
The Adam Kozik Studio was in touch earlier this week with news of Danseur Noble, a photo-series of male dancers posed indoors and out. See the rest of the series here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The tights have it
• Torero
• Eonism and Eonnagata
• Tiger Lily
• Chris Nash
• Peter Reed and Salomé After Dark
• Felix D’Eon
• Dancers by John Andresen
• Youssef Nabil
• Images of Nijinsky
The Biblical bad girl returns in three pictures from an illustrated edition of Oscar Wilde’s play, published as a limited run in 1930. Manuel Orazi (1860–1934) was a French artist whose work has appeared here before, and no doubt will do again very soon since I’ve been finding further examples of his illustrations and designs. These drawings are closer to Gustav Klimt or George Barbier than his earlier illustrations which owed much to the stylisation of Mucha’s Art Nouveau.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The Salomé archive