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Dormitorium: The Film Décors of the Quay Brothers

The Tailor’s Shop from Street of Crocodiles.

I’m back home after a whirlwind visit to London, having earlier received an invitation from the Quay Brothers to the opening night of their Dormitorium exhibition at the Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury. The show is the London debut of a display of sets and puppets from all the Quays’ major films. This is also a slightly expanded exhibition, previous outings such as the one at the Museum of Modern Art in New York having been staged before they made their more recent films. New additions include several cases devoted to characters from The Doll’s Breath, and one that features characters and tiny set elements from their new feature film, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.

Characters from The Doll’s Breath.

One of the curious things about looking at art in our mediated age is that you can become very familiar with certain paintings or drawings yet only have a vague idea as to the actual size of the originals, even when dimensions are printed along with reproductions in books. So too with the Quays’ puppets and décors. All the details are very familiar yet I wasn’t prepared to see those familiar details differing so much in size. The box that contains the puppets from This Unnamable Little Broom, for example, is very large, yet the boxes you see shortly after this, containing sets from Street of Crocodiles, are much smaller, a factor which makes everything inside those boxes seem dizzyingly concentrated. Choice of materials has obviously determined some of this. In the films where the Quays have used ceramic doll’s heads the sets have had to be constructed to the scale of the found artefacts. All of the more recent puppets have been constructed at a larger size.

The Calligrapher.

The other surprise of the exhibition was the cabinets themselves. A few of these have been built to take advantage of the exhibition setting: the box featuring ‘The Calligrapher’ has a large distorting lens set into its front glass panel, while the cabinet next to it, showing the rippled landscape from The Comb, has glass sides which allow the viewer to more easily read the anamorphic lettering stretched over the hills. Several other cabinets present their contents like peepshow exhibits, their portholes being filled with yet more distorting lenses which offer mutable views of the illuminated exhibits within.

Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies.

All these wonders will be on display at the Swedenborg Hall until 4th April. Entry is free if you’d like to disturb the sleep of the inhabitants. In return they’ll do their best to disturb your dreams.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Quay Brothers archive

A Grammar of Japanese Ornament and Design

Among the new uploads to the Internet Archive is A Grammar of Japanese Ornament and Design (1880) by Thomas W. Cutler. The title is an echo of Owen Jones’ landmark study, The Grammar of Ornament (1856), a much larger volume which devotes several pages to Chinese decoration but says nothing about the Japanese. Japan’s self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world only ended in the 1860s, a restriction which had limited the spread of Japanese culture for over two centuries. Cutler’s book capitalised on the new openness and a growing interest in the country which fuelled a fervour for “Japonisme” among Western artists.

Where Owen Jones condensed whole cultures and histories into a few pages, Cutler examines a wide range of Japanese art and decoration, from details of plants and animals as found in ukiyo-e prints, to the stylised kamon emblems used by Japanese families. His book is distinguished by many pages of precise line drawings, together with reproductions of whole prints. More details like these may be found in the books of waves and clouds by Yuzan Mori and Korin Furuya.

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Weekend links 769

Araki Street in Yotsuya (1935) by Tsuchiya Koitsu.

• “Cambridge, home of analytic philosophy, was also a hotbed of psychical research. How did this spooky subject take root?” Matyás Moravec on philosophers and precognitive dreams, Alan Turing’s interest in telepathy, and more.

• DJ Food remembers Doug Lear, founder of the Magic Lantern Narrowboat Theatre. Related: Lear’s Magical Lanterns, a TV documentary from 1983.

• New music: WEM Dominator (Live in London NW1, 2016) by Earth; and Rubber Band Music by Kate Carr.

• At Public Domain Review: Master of Claude de France’s book of flower studies (ca. 1510–1515).

• At Colossal: Landscapes, customs, and culture shape the 2025 Sony World Photography Awards.

• At the BFI: Carmen Gray offers suggestions for ten great Baltic films.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – March 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Room Temperature Day.

• Vinyl sleeves from Supraphon.

• Telephone And Rubber Band (1981) by Penguin Cafe Orchestra | Rubbermiro (1981) by Liquid Liquid | Onions Wrapped In Rubber (1994) by Tortoise

M-A-N-C-H-E-S-T-E-R

Presenting a new item for sale at Redbubble. I was intending to upload this quickly then get on with other things, but after examining the artwork it became apparent that the piece would benefit from an overhaul in order to make something that worked well at poster size. The original design dates from 2004 when I was asked by friends at the Manchester District Music Archive to contribute to a limited run of postcards they were putting together based on Manchester’s music history. Since I was working for postcard size I didn’t finesse the artwork as much as I would have done had I been working for a larger printing. What you see here is a replication of the original design at a much larger size, with a couple of details adjusted and a more substantial change in the substitution of the black-and-white photo (see below).

The original postcard set appeared two years before I began writing these posts so I’ve never had the chance to compile a list of all the references. Some of these will be familiar to Mancunians (and many Britons) of a certain age but I was trying to be allusive rather than obvious while also following three simple rules:
1) Ten panels, each one of which contains a different letter of the city’s name in a different typeface.
2) Each panel referring to a different musical trend, a notable group or venue.
3) The whole design to proceed chronologically, from the 1960s to the present day.

The music: Psychedelia.
The type design: Decorated 035.

The first two letters are rather vague attributions since the city didn’t have much of a national musical profile until the late 1970s. Popular Manchester groups of the 1960s included The Hollies, Herman’s Hermits, and The Mind Benders but there wasn’t a discernible Manchester scene the way there was with post-Beatles Liverpool. So “M” stands for the psychedelic era in general, while Decorated 035 is one of the typical mid-century sign fonts that you would have seen around the city.

The venue/music: The Apollo Theatre/Punk.
The type design: Jackson.

“A” is for the Apollo Theatre in Ardwick Green, the city’s most prominent music venue in the 1970s, although I doubt that anyone would guess the attribution. The Art Deco building is a good venue but here’s never been anything distinctive about its signage, hence the choice of Jackson, another very decade-specific font which has conveniently wide letterforms. The rip refers to torn posters and punk graphics while the opposed green/red colour scheme is borrowed from one of the Virgin label designs of the late 70s, something that might also be taken as a very tenuous reference to the Virgin Megastore in Market Street.

The music: Buzzcocks.
The type design: A pair of Zs from the cover of Orgasm Addict.

The first Buzzcocks single featured a striking sleeve by Malcolm Garrett (design) and Linder (collage) which provide the graphics here, with the “N” being formed by two letters from the band’s name which was printed vertically on the cover.

The music: Joy Division.
The type design: A letter from the cover of Substance.

Substance, the first Joy Division compilation, was released in 1988 so this is a little anachronistic but Brett Wickens’ letter is a more recognisable detail than one from the cover of Closer. The textured sleeve of the group’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures, is referred to by the panel background.

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De Nerée and Luisa Casati

Luisa Casati (1922) by Man Ray.

Today’s post is another in the series of irregular art essays by Sander Bink. The subject this time is Luisa Casati (1881–1957), the Italian heiress who burnt through a fortune living extravagantly while being drawn or painted by many of the most notable artists of her time. (I did my own very stylised portrait of the Marchesa for Bruce Sterling’s Pirate Utopia, a novel where Casati briefly appears among the cast of real and fictional characters.) As before with Sander’s posts, Carel de Nerée tot Babberich is one of the artists under discussion. Thanks, Sander!

* * *

Carel de Nerée around 1905.

Many artists have paid homage to the ‘living artwork’ and legendary fashion icon Luisa Casati. Artists such as Man Ray, Paul-César Helleu, Giovanni Boldini, Léon Bakst, Kees van Dongen, Alastair, Romaine Brooks and Giacomo Balla have immortalised her. Legend has it that a certain fascinating Dutch artist should also be added to this list: Carel de Nerée tot Babberich (1880–1909). (Previously: 1 & 2)

Luisa Casati with Greyhound (1908) by Giovanni Boldini. Private collection.

By 1930, Casati’s decadent and luxurious lifestyle had left her millions in debt. To escape her creditors, she moved to London. In the years before her death in 1957, she was seen scavenging for food in rubbish bins. In these final years, she naturally preferred to look to the past rather than the present, making lists of all those who had portrayed her then fading glory. Remarkably, one of these features De Nerée. Scot D. Ryersson and Michael Yaccarino, in their classic biography Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati, write about this period:

Whereas her evenings were absorbed by occult passions, the Marchesa spent part of her days writing lists. One was an inventory of the renowned personages she had known. There were others cataloguing the many artists, famous and lesser known, who had represented her. The difficulty of creating a comprehensive index of contributors to the ‘Casati Gallery’ is compounded both by Luisa’s incomplete and inaccurate records and by the lack of information concerning the minor portraitists, such as Mrs. Leslie Cotton and Karel de Nerée tot Babberich and those who were simply wealthy dilettantes. Boldini, John, van Dongen, and Epstein are noted alongside Hohenlohe, Nikolai Riabushinsky, theatrical designer Oliver Messel, and Eduardo Chicharro, director of the Spanish Academy of Fine Art in Rome.

The footnote to this paragraph states:

Christophe Henri Karel de Nerée tot Babberich (1880–1909) was a little-known Dutch artist whose pen and ink work is highly reminiscent of Martini and Alastair. Although there is little material documenting Casati’s association with or influence on the artist, many of the highly stylized and bizarre female subjects of his drawings share a more than coincidental resemblance to the Marchesa.

De Nerée did, indeed, draw several dark-eyed female figures in extravagant dresses, all of which could easily pass for a portrait of Casati. In the book The Marchesa Casati: Portraits of a Muse (2009), Ryersson and Yaccarino give an overview of all the works of art based on Casati. A drawing by De Nerée of a very slender figure with dark eyes is identified as a portrait of Casati and dated 1905.

Het schone beeld (The beautiful image, 1900–01) by Carel de Nerée. Private Collection. Estate of Barry Humphries.

The authors were not 100% sure of this identification, but due to the almost complete lack of documentation on De Nerée’s life and work at the time, they chose this drawing. In an email to me in 2010, the authors withdrew this identification because of this lack of documentation. It is actually a drawing dating from 1900–01, based on a story by Henri Borel. Of course, we immediately set about trying to find out which of De Nerée’s drawings could be a portrait of Casati.

In their email, Ryersson and Yaccarino give some more information:

In the papers left behind by the Marchesa, after her death in 1957, was a list she had made herself of those artists who had done her portraits. Babberich was on that list. His portrait of her, done in pencil, was from around 1905. We do not know how they met, but the Marchesa travelled frequently and extensively and was fond of the work of such symbolist artists as Alberto Martini, Gustav Mossa, and Alastair, so it is not surprising that Babberich caught her attention somehow.

De Nerée and Casati make an excellent match indeed. ‘She was only too pleased to promote artists whose aesthetic she felt an affinity with, and those whose work was so contrary to popular taste’, Ryersson and Yaccarino write in Portraits of a Muse. In 2015, I began working on what has now become the first full-length biography of De Nerée. Research showed that De Nerée actually deregistered from The Hague in October 1905 in order to settle in Rome.

Rome travel guide with De Nerées’ annotation “Roma, October 1905”. Private collection.

One reason for this was that, from 1905, De Nerée’s life was increasingly set in the aristocratic and very wealthy circles of southern Europe. In 1907, for example, he met Gabriel d’Annunzio, a lover of Casati’s, in Florence. Perhaps he had met him before. And in 1908, for example, he drew a portrait of Baroness Clementine Maria von Reuter (1855–1941), daughter of the wealthy Baron Paul von Reuter (1816–1899), founder of Reuters news agency. (Private collection, Netherlands).

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