{art} – Page 614 – { feuilleton }

Super-objects!

There’s nothing new about the observation that American superhero comics are often stupidly sexist. The tendency to depict women in superhero comics as little more than super-powered fetish figures increased considerably during the 1990s, so much so that at one time The Comics Journal was making a regular note each issue of recent covers showing women with breasts larger than their heads. This Livejournal page does an amusing job of showing how the comic racks might look if there was at least a degree of equality at work.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

The Butterfly Alphabet

Naturalist, lecturer and photographer Kjell Sandved photographs the natural occurence of letter and number shapes on butterfly wings. You can order posters of these beautiful patterns from his site.

The art of Jean-Marie Poumeyrol

L’abattoir.

From ‘Visionary Art in France’, The Visionary Review, Fall 2004:

Poumeyrol shares with Margotton a fascination for the interior landscape, where dimly illuminated grottos resonate with the remains of past epochs. And yet, his barren and abandoned spaces are often redolent with signs of the artists’ own lost memories.

In his early works, Jean-Marie Poumeyrol was recognized as a master of erotica, combining hallucinogenic and macabre imagery in an unparalleled manner. But, in his maturity, the artist has displayed a marked fascination for landscapes, particularly the enclosed spaces of sewers, industrial waste and disposal plants. Yet, the amazing accuracy and finesse of rendering which enlivened his early works has not left him and, if anything, only increased with age.

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Dalí Atomicus

Photographed by Philippe Halsman in 1947, one of Halsman’s many Dalí portraits.

Las Pozas and Edward James

Edward James by René Magritte, La Reproduction Interdite (1937).

Art collector Edward James (1907–1984) was a characteristically English eccentric, a kind of 20th century equivalent of William Beckford or Horace Walpole, who was captivated by Surrealism in the 1930s and became a lifelong devotee of the movement. Much of his inherited wealth was spent supporting artists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Lenora Carrington and his homes at Monkton House and Walpole Street in London were transformed into showcases of Surrealist decor; Dalí’s famous sofa modelled on Mae West’s lips was designed with assistance from James.

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