Month: March 2007

Transfer drawings by Robert Rauschenberg

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No title (1969).

Robert Rauschenberg–Transfer Drawings of the 1960s
Jonathan O’Hara Gallery
41 East 57th Street, Suite 1302, New York, NY 10022
February 8th–March 17th 2007

The transfer technique, which he took up in 1958, had remarkably few moving parts. It involved soaking newspaper or magazine clippings in solvent, laying them face down on drawing paper and then hatching back and forth across them with a dry pen nib. The results dazzle; in a flickering, almost strobelike effect, images seem to rise to the surface like memories through a scrim—or through the static of a television set. The critic Lawrence Alloway likened the fluctuating motifs to “a postcard stand in a windstorm.”

A Rarely Seen Side of a Rauschenberg Shift.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jasper Johns

Fantômas

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…Fantômas was championed by the Parisian avant-garde, first by the young poets gathered around Guillaume Apollinaire, who, together with Max Jacob, founded a Société des Amis de Fantômas in 1913, and later by the surrealists. In July 1914, in the literary review Mercure de France, Apollinaire declared the imaginary richness of Fantômas unparalleled. The same month, in Apollinaire’s own review, Les Soirées de Paris, Maurice Raynal proclaimed Feuillade’s Fantômas saturated with genius. Over the next two decades, poets such as Blaise Cendrars (who called the series “The Aeneid of Modern Times”), Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau, and Robert Desnos, and painters such as Juan Gris, Yves Tanguy, and René Magritte, incorporated Fantômas motifs into their works. Pierre Prévert’s 1928 film, Paris la Belle, featured a Fantômas book cover in the closing sequence, and the Lord of Terror was adapted to the surrealist screen in Ernest Moerman’s 1936 film short, Mr. Fantômas, Chapitre 280,000. As the century progresses, Fantômas remained a minor source of artistic inspiration as the subject of cultural nostalgia.

Continued here.