A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Painting
{ feuilleton } brings you good cheer! Little explanation required this time. Vedder’s painting is an illustration of lines from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
The Cup of Death by Elihu Vedder (1885).
The Plague of Rome by Jules-Elie Delauney (1869).
The Angel of Death by Evelyn De Morgan.
The Treasures of Satan by Jean Delville (1894).
Some more favourite paintings today. Jean Delville produced a splendidly strange portrayal of Satan as an undersea monarch lording it over a sprawl of intoxicated, naked figures. When Savoy Books decided to put together the definitive version of David Lindsay’s equally strange fantasy novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, I felt this was the only painting adequate to the task of filling out the cover. That was in 2002; a year later Gollancz used the same painting on the cover of their Fantasy Masterworks paperback edition of the book. Lindsay’s book has been plagued by bad cover art for years so we managed to raise the bar for future editions. Delville was one of the great painters of the Symbolist school, all his work is worth looking at.
There are numerous representations of Lucifer but Franz Stuck’s is especially striking and apparently caused viewers to cross themselves before it when it was first exhibited.
Gustave Doré’s tumbling figure is from his illustrated edition of Paradise Lost, a book full of armour-clad, spiky-winged angels. Some of those wings have even found their way into my work via the miracle of Photoshop.
Lucifer by Franz Stuck (1890).
Paradise Lost by Gustave Doré (1866).
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Thomas Häfner, 1928–1985
On Monday Eroom Nala mentioned my Fallen Angel picture in one of the comments for the first angel posting. Here’s the picture in question (from 2004).
As I mentioned earlier, this was based on Jeune homme assis au bord de la mer (Young Man Sitting by the Seashore, 1836), the most well-known painting by Jean Hippolyte Flandrin (1809–1864). In a posting back in February I wrote about how this painting has become something of a gay icon over 170 years, with increasing numbers of artists and photographers working their own variations on the pose. As far as I was aware, I was the only person to have tried adding wings to the figure.
Now today I run across a great gallery of photographs by Jose Manchado who has his rather gorgeous model, Reuben, adopt the same pose then gives him a set of abstract wings.
Manchado’s other photographs are well worth a look. He also adds more realistic wings to a female model but since we’re concerning ourselves with male angels this week I’ll leave you to look for her.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The recurrent pose archive
Angelus Novus by Paul Klee (1920?).
The Catholic church failed to work its medieval magic on me beyond inspiring a fondness for ecclesiastic architecture and men with wings. But in keeping with the season it’s Angel Week here on { feuilleton } although some of the angels featured may not be quite Vatican-approved.
Above is the Paul Klee painting that prompted Walter Benjamin’s celebrated piece from ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940) in Illuminations:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one perceives the angel of history. His face is towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
A world away from Benjamin’s wreckage, Caravaggio paints a typically luscious boy who just happens to have a pair of wings stuck to his back cradling a swooning saint in St Francis in Ecstasy. Ecstasy as a theme isn’t unknown in religious art, of course, but Renaissance painters usually showed St Theresa doing the fainting. Caravaggio was following a different muse.
St Francis in Ecstasy by Caravaggio (1595).
The pair of embracing angels tumbling into the marvellous Seven Acts of Mercy (below) are slightly more robust, a lot more so than the creature posing in Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1597), a picture whose precise religious content seems tenuous at best. And there are still those who believe Caravaggio’s interest in male flesh was solely artistic…
Seven Acts of Mercy by Caravaggio (1607).
More angels tomorrow.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
Left: Stowitts photgraphed by Nickolas Muray, 1922.
Hubert Julian Stowitts had a number of careers, including dancer, film actor, painter, designer and metaphysician. As a dancer he worked with Anna Pavlova, who discovered him in California in 1915 and took him on tour around the world. His statuesque figure was used by Rex Ingram for the infernal scenes in The Magician (1926), an adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s rather limp roman-à-clef based on the exploits of Aleister Crowley. The scene with Stowitts as a satyr owed nothing to the book, however, being more inspired by the director’s fondness for the tales of Arthur Machen. Most photos that turn up from this film show Stowitts rather than Paul Wegener who played the sinister alchemist of the title.
Stowitt’s painting developed in the 1930s and included a series of 55 paintings of nude (male) athletes for the 1936 Olympics (see Ewoud Broeksma’s contemporary equivalents at originalolympics.com). Other paintings depicted dance scenes, costume designs, people encountered during travels in the Far East and, in the 1950s, a series of ten Theosophist pictures entitled The Atomic Age Suite.
Prince Suwarno in Mahabarata role (1928).
Briggs Hunt and William Golden (1936).
The Crucifixion in Space (1950).
• The Stowitts Museum and Library
• Stowitts at the Queer Arts Resource
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Nicholas Kalmakoff, 1873–1955