John – { feuilleton }

Richard M. Powers album covers

Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique (1958); Charles Munch, Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Continuing an occasional series about artists or designers whose work has appeared on record sleeves. Richard M. Powers is one of those illustrators whose work is remembered today for his many covers for SF books and magazines even though his commissions often took him away from the genre. Powers’ early paintings for record companies use the wiry illustration style that was popular during the 1950s, few of them resemble the X-ray views or amorphous, Tanguy-like forms that populate his cosmic vistas and alien worlds. The cover for Symphonie Fantastique is an exception, justified by the suite’s narrative thread which involves visions seen in an opium dream.

Powers is also unique, I think, in having an entire album of music dedicated to his SF covers, Powers (12 Sound Pieces Inspired By The Art Of Richard M. Powers) by Andy Partridge. This album doesn’t feature any of Powers’ own artwork but the illustrations are done in his style so the cover has been included in this list.

Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 3 in A Minor “The Scotch” (1955); Music Appreciation Symphony Orchestra.

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.6 In B Minor, Op.74 – Pathétique (1956); Leonard Bernstein, Music Appreciation Symphony Orchestra, The Stadium Concerts Symphony Orchestra.

Verdi: Rigoletto (1956); The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra And Chorus conducted by Fausto Cleva, Robert McFerrin, Sr.

Johann Strauss: Die Fledermaus (1956); Tibor Kozma, The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra And Chorus.

Mozart: The Marriage Of Figaro (Highlights) (1956); Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, Giorgio Tozzi, Roberta Peters, Lisa Della Casa, George London, Rosalind Elias.

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The Magic Shop, a film by Ian Emes

An illustration by Arthur Wallis Mills from The Strand Magazine, June, 1903.

I had not thought the place was there, to tell the truth—a modest-sized frontage in Regent Street, between the picture shop and the place where the chicks run about just out of patent incubators—but there it was sure enough. I had fancied it was down nearer the Circus, or round the corner in Oxford Street, or even in Holborn; always over the way and a little inaccessible it had been, with something of the mirage in its position…

Despite writing about an HG Wells adaptation only a week ago I hadn’t gone searching for more of them when this one turned up anyway, rather like Wells’ mysterious shop. I’d actually been looking at the filmography of the late Ian Emes, a director best known for the short animations he made for Pink Floyd’s concerts, although his career encompassed animated shorts like The Beard as well as longer films for television and the cinema. The Magic Shop, which was made in 1982, looks as though it might have been another of those shorts that used to be programmed as supporting titles for first-run features in British cinemas. Andrew Birkin’s Sredni Vashtar was one of these, a film which is also under 30 minutes in length and an adaptation of a popular piece of Edwardian fiction.

HG Wells’ story was first published in The Strand Magazine in June 1903 then collected in Wells’ Twelve Stories and a Dream a few months later. It’s been one of my favourite Wells stories since I first read it at the age of 11, as I mentioned in this review of the 1964 TV version. Wells’ fantasy reached me just as I was beginning to get very interested in conjuring tricks. I’d also been reading Victorian ghost stories in the reprint collections being published by Puffin and Lion, so a story about a shop that sold magic tricks, where the premises and proprietor had a slightly sinister quality, was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to read.

Ian Emes’ adaptation is a more successful Wells film than The Door in the Wall, and a much better adaptation of the story itself than the attempt to update the tale for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, but Emes still doesn’t really capture the spirit of the story. The main flaw is that the actor playing the boy who wants to explore the shop is too old for the role. The narrator’s son in the story is around five or six years old, and much of the tension in the telling comes from the way that the boy sees everything that’s happening as delightful and magical while the father experiences rising alarm at the unfolding events and the situation in which the pair find themselves. The second half of the story, in which father and son are led by the shopowner into the labyrinthine warehouse behind the shop, is also lacking. Emes’ production may have been compromised by its budget but there’s no sign of the surprises that you might have expected to be filmed by a former animator. Derek Jarman regular Karl Johnson plays the father, Ron Cook is the shopowner, and there’s a cameo near the beginning from William Rushton as the man whose whining son is denied admittance to the shop. (Rushton had earlier provided the voice of the afflicted shaver in The Beard.) At the end of Emes’ film father and son find themselves teleported to what looks like a back street somewhere near the river instead of being returned to a busy London street. This reminds me that the first time I visited Regent Street myself at the age of 13 I had half a mind to go looking for the “Genuine Magic Shop”—or to try and identify the place where it might have been. The elusive nature of Wells’ establishment makes it the forerunner of the chemist shop owned by the malevolent Grail-seekers in Charles Williams’ War in Heaven, which makes me wonder now whether Williams borrowed the idea from Wells.

Ian Emes’ film may be seen at his Vimeo channel (log-in required, or you can use the Vimeo app). The story can be found in a collection of fifty-four of Wells’ short stories at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Door in the Wall, 1956
• Claude Shepperson’s First Men in the Moon
• The Beard, a film by Ian Emes
• Uncharted islands and lost souls
• Doctor Moreau book covers
• The Island of Doctor Moreau
• Harry Willock book covers
• The Time Machine
• The Magic Shop by HG Wells
• HG Wells in Classics Illustrated
• The night that panicked America
• The Door in the Wall
• War of the Worlds book covers

Weekend links 753

Grow (1970) by Linda Brewer.Via.

• The week in work-related reviews: Raymond Tyler reviewed the Bumper Book of Magic at Religious Socialism, while James Palmer did the same at Foreign Policy. Meanwhile, Rob Latham at the Los Angeles Review of Books examined the legacy of the New Wave of science fiction with reviews of New Worlds 224, and The Last Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison’s long-delayed story collection.

• “Incline Press is a private fine press publisher in the UK, stubbornly printing with hand set, metal type on a collection of vintage machines, working with poets and artists to make limited edition books and ephemera.”

• New music: Horses In Your Blood, another dose of unhinged weirdness from Moon Wiring Club; The Source by Jon Palmer; and Ekkorääg by Tarotplane.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Rikki Ducornet The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade (1999).

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “Rare atlas of astronomy from the Dutch Golden Age goes on display in England“.

• Old music: Jon Savage’s Space, a space-themed compilation on Caroline True Records.

• At The Daily Heller: Berman’s Book Boom is a boon to graphic design’s legacy.

• At Public Domain Review: Christoph Jamnitzer’s Neuw Grotteßken Buch (1610).

• Mix of the week: A Dungeon Synth mix by Flickers From The Fen for The Wire.

• At Heavy Metal Magazine: The HP Lovecraft Art of John Holmes.

• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Laurie Anderson.

• I Can Hear The Grass Grow (1967) by The Move | Grow Fins (1972) by Captain Beefheart | The Growing (2011) by The Haxan Cloak

The Mona Lisa Curse

How I miss Robert Hughes. In print or on the television screen he was one of those rare people whose appearances you didn’t want to miss. On television especially, a medium where he excelled when discussing art or architecture. As I said when his death was announced in 2012, the first two words I wrote here (on 13th February, 2006) were “Robert Hughes”, introducing an extract from a Hughes piece that ran in The Guardian earlier that day. An impromptu choice, as was the launch date, but greeting the world with a pointer to his words felt right somehow: begin as you mean to go on.

The Mona Lisa Curse was Hughes’ last television essay, made for the UK’s Channel 4 in 2008. After I’d rewatched The Shock of the New two years ago I followed the series with a delve into as many of his films as I could find. The Mona Lisa Curse was one that I’d missed when it was broadcast, and I couldn’t find a decent copy during the retrospective binge. Happily it’s finally turned up at (yes) the Internet Archive. Hughes’ subject this time is the commodity fetishism of the art world, and the growth of money as the dominant factor in the creation, dissemination and discussion of art today. The cult of pictorial celebrity that blossomed around the Mona Lisa when it was brought to New York in 1962 is seen by Hughes as a key moment in a shift of perception that took place in the way that art was viewed in the 20th century. The pernicious effect of money on the art world had already been addressed by the chapter that Hughes added to the book editions of The Shock of the New, a piece which charted the explosive growth of the art market in the 1980s. The Mona Lisa Curse looks at all that has happened since, with American museums turned into global brands, and the ownership of art (especially anything made by a reputable artist) being seen in terms of investment as much as aesthetics.

Money has long been a factor in the production of Western art, the traditional gilded picture frame evolved because the paintings inside those frames were intended for wealthy homes. Hughes’ argument here is that the situation has never been as bad as it is today. I’ve been making similar complaints since the 1990s—whatever else they might think they’re doing, the majority of successful contemporary artists are creating exclusive objects for the ownership of the very rich—but you seldom see a complaint like this defined so well or given such a prominent platform. (Yes, unsellable art exists: land art, installations, performances, ephemeral works. Most art is still a unique object of some sort, one that can be sold and resold.) Hughes emphasises that outside the illegal drug trade, art is the largest unregulated market in the world. With billions of dollars changing hands every year nobody complicit in any part of the exchange is going to criticise the situation so long as they’re in a position to receive a portion of that money, however small.

Hughes was 70 when he made this film, although he seemed much older in his later years as a result of a near-fatal car accident in 1999. His bullish, stumbling figure is contrasted with shots of him as he was in the 1970s, including extracts from a film made shortly after he’d landed the job of art critic for TIME magazine. The clips that show him with long hair, dressed in a cut-off denim jacket, are a reminder that while in London he was friends with the other ex-pat Australians at Oz magazine. The Mona Lisa Curse, which was directed by Mandy Chang, may not have been intended as a final statement at the end of a career but it’s hard to avoid that impression when you watch it now. If Hughes’ comments about the art market seem like the curmudgeonly complaints of an old man, consider this for a moment:

With the aplomb of a banker, you’ll end up in the most hideous living-rooms in the world. The coffee-table bears the sanitized book of your work, and the magazine next to it illustrates your patron’s good taste, status and investment rule.

That was much a younger Derek Jarman, writing in 1982 when the present situation had barely begun. In the 1980s art could still make its presence felt outside the galleries even if it was only through causing some minor outrage, as with the fuss in 1989 when US politicians took exception to public money being used to exhibit works by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. Nobody cares today what artists do in galleries, the culture wars are being fought elsewhere. Pictorial celebrity and monetary value is all that the art world has left to capture the attention of the wider public.

I was wondering how to end this piece but the news this week has done it for me: “Magritte’s Surrealist Masterpiece Sets $121.2 Million Auction Record“. “The brand recognition of Magritte is incredibly strong,” says a New York dealer, discussing the artist as though he was a product on a supermarket shelf. Which painting will be the first to sell for a billion dollars? Place your bets now.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Rebel Ready-Made
• The Shock of the New
• Robert Hughes, 1938–2012

The Golden Hind: A Quarterly Magazine of Art and Literature

Well, here we are at last… After years of waiting for scanned copies of The Golden Hind to turn up, now that they have done I’m still frustrated. The magazine was one of the many small arts periodicals being published in Britain during the 1920s. It had an erratic, eight-issue run from 1922 to 1924, and remains notable for being the second (and last) magazine to be co-edited by Austin Osman Spare. The artist’s first magazine venture, Form, had been edited by Spare and “Francis Marsden” (Frederick Carter), with the pair publishing two issues before the outbreak of the First World War, followed by a final issue in 1921. Spare co-edited The Golden Hind with writer Clifford Bax, creating a publication whose contents were less mystical than Form had been, while also providing more of a showcase for artists other than Spare himself.

Inevitably, it’s the artists that interest me the most in The Golden Hind, even though the magazine was running pieces by writers like Aldous Huxley and Edith Sitwell. Many of the artists have been featured here before, some of them on many occasions: Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt), John Austen, Harry Clarke, Garth Jones, Henry Keen, and Allan Odle. Spare’s own drawings have since been recycled in various books but most of the other drawings, woodcuts, linocuts and prints remain exclusive to the magazine. The John Austen contributions are especially fine, further examples of his decorated style which borrows heavily from Aubrey Beardsley and Harry Clarke, and which he used so well in his illustrated Hamlet. The spirit of Beardsley’s 1890s is very much in evidence in The Golden Hind, a demonstration, perhaps, that Spare was once again looking back to The Savoy magazine as an example to be followed; one of the essays concerns the poety of The Savoy‘s literary editor, Arthur Symons.

In addition to artists whose popular works are still reprinted today there are less well-known figures like Sidney Hunt whose drawings owed more to contemporary trends than many of the other contributors. Hunt later edited an avant-garde magazine of his own, Ray, while producing his own brand of homoerotic prints like the Ganymede with Zeus which may be seen in The Golden Hind’s final issue.

The frustration I referred to above is my usual complaint about image quality. All the copies of the magazine have been taken from microfilm archives which means the pages aren’t grey enough to be illegible but their general murkiness is enough to destroy a lot of the artwork, especially the lithographs and other prints. The samples you see here have been brightened a little which does improve some of the line art but can do nothing for the rest. But I’m not going to complain too much. It’s taken a long time to be able to browse a complete run of this magazine, and I feel fortunate to do so even in this compromised manner. Better copies may still surface eventually. Fingers crossed.

Continue reading “The Golden Hind: A Quarterly Magazine of Art and Literature”