Weekend links 398

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Untitled art by Felix D’Eon. Via Dangerous Minds.

• “The music inside lived up to the cover’s challenge: a collage of pop-culture nostalgia, hard-rock guitar, piano-driven melodies, stylised high vocals, strange musical structures and experimental sound pictures. Roxy Music’s eponymous album sounded like nothing else in 1971 and 1972—and like nothing else the group would ever attempt again.” Jon Savage on the creation of Roxy Music’s debut album.

• Behind the scenes of the BFI’s forthcoming Derek Jarman box-sets. Jarman appears in a rare acting role (not one of his strengths) in Dead Cat (1989) a short film by David Lewis which is only now being released on DVD.

• Rob Young’s long-awaited book about Cologne’s finest, Can, has finally been given a publication date. All Gates Open: The Story of Can will be published by Faber in May.

• At the Lever Gallery, London: UNCOVERED: Illustrating the Sixties and Seventies. Wallpaper magazine has a related feature about the exhibition.

Trim Tabroid [sic]: Yui Takada’s Instagram showing Japanese tabloid pages reduced to abstraction by careful pruning.

• On Fairy Tales: Carol Mavor and Marina Warner in discussion for the London Review Bookshop podcast.

• Mixes of the week: XLR8R podcast 527 by Peter Van Hoesen, and Secret Thirteen Mix 245 by Chikiss.

• Dubbing is a Must: Oli Warwick on the modern sound of leftfield dub.

This Book Is Bound in Lab-Grown Jellyfish Leather.

Cornelius’s Favourite Albums

Dubism (1976) by The Upsetters | Dub Fi Gwan (1979) by King Tubby | Dub Yalil (1995) by Natacha Atlas

Carl Larsson’s Angel of Death

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I’ve known the work of Swedish artist Carl Larsson (1853–1919) for many years via a collection of drawings and paintings of the artist’s family and home life, light works created between bouts of more serious painting. The interiors in the At Home series are especially good, meticulously rendered watercolours which today resemble the kinds of delineations found in Continental comic books. Less familiar is the work Larsson created prior to these drawings.

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Dödens Engel (The Angel of the Death) is a book-length religious poem by Johan Olof Wallin inspired by the cholera epidemic of the 1830s, the same epidemic that Poe writes about in The Sphinx. Larsson illustrates every page of this edition from 1880, deploying the full range of traditional death symbolism: skulls, hourglasses, scythes, extinguished torches and so on.The sombre imagery makes a striking contrast with the pictures of Larsson’s home life yet the painting for which he hoped to be remembered, Midvinterblot (1915), is equally doom-laden, a huge canvas that depicts a king preparing to sacrifice himself to spare his people from famine.

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1918

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The Dying Dandy by Nils Dardel.

Wishing you all a happy new year with a small selection of art from a century ago.

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Schicksal by Fritz Baumann.

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Black Still Life by Genrich Matveevich Blumenfeld.

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Two Heads by Giorgio de Chirico.

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The weekend artists, 2017

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Art by Twins of Evil for the forthcoming blu-ray from Arrow Academy.

The laziest post of the year is invariably a review of the artists/designers/photographers featured on the weekend posts, so here’s another end-of-year list for you. Scroll down to see what caught my attention over the past twelve months.

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Mass by Ron Mueck at the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial. Photo by Tom Ross.

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French poster by Basha (Barbara Baranowska) for Andrzej Zulawski’s extraordinary Possession (1981).

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I Had Sweet Company Because I Sought Out None. Collage by Helen Adam.

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Still of an Alive Painting by Akiko Nakayama.

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Gustave Doré’s Contes Drolatiques

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I mentioned Gustave Doré in the Émile Bayard post last week so here’s something from the man himself. I’ve known a couple of the pictures in this 614-page volume for a long time but it’s taken me until this week to look through them all. Doré began his career as a creator of humorous illustrations, and his early illustrated books were at the lighter end of the scale. His flair for the comic and the grotesque are combined in this 1855 edition of Balzac’s stories with a total of 425 drawings, some of which feature the artist’s taste for violent death. As always with Doré, his drawings were filled and embellished by a team of engravers but this is still a remarkable amount of work. What you see here is a necessarily small selection of the full-page pictures; the entire book may be browsed at the Internet Archive.

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