A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Cities
Passage Bourg l’Abbé, Paris. Photo by FlickrDelusions.
Cours et passages à Paris, the perfect Flickr pool for anyone who shares my fetish pour les passages couverts de Paris.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arcades panoramas
• Arcades
• Passage des Panoramas
• Passages 2
• Passages
The London broadsheets have been in a ferment for the past few days over a forthcoming exhibition at the V&A, The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900 which opens on April 2nd. The Guardian‘s Jonathan Jones wrote a piece pointing out the French associations of the British Aesthetes in which he mentions the Hôtel d’Alsace at 13 Rue des Beaux-Arts, Paris, the place where Oscar Wilde spent his last few months in 1900 prior to expiring in room no. 16. By coincidence I’d been looking at my own photos of the hotel only the day before so here they are, little more than snapshots but they give an idea of the building at least.
The hotel is now merely L’Hôtel, and I had a couple of surprises when I went to find the place the last time I was in Paris. The first is that the Rue des Beaux-Arts is some distance away from any main thoroughfares, although this perhaps isn’t so surprising given Wilde’s straitened circumstances. The second was seeing a plaque to Jorge Luis Borges (see below) on the wall opposite the one for Oscar Wilde with its incorrect year of birth. Borges had a lifelong fascination with Wilde, the first piece he had published was a translation into Spanish of The Happy Prince (and The Modern Word has a short essay by Borges about Wilde). I knew that Borges had stayed in the hotel (there’s a famous photo of him standing in the atrium) but didn’t expect his patronage to be commemorated in this way; once again, Paris has a respect for writers that puts many other cities to shame. Wilde is celebrated with two plaques—there’s another beside the door which can be seen here—but what these pictures don’t show is the atrium itself, a small space in the centre of the building which gives the hotel a distinction Wilde might have appreciated even if he would have preferred to spend his final hours in one of the more luxurious establishments.
There are more views of the narrow Rue des Beaux-Arts at Google Maps while the hotel has a website here.
Re-reading Alfred Kubin’s strange fantasy novel Die Andere Seite (The Other Side) this week, I found myself suffering the same frustration as when I bought the book, namely that the illustrations in the Dedalus edition are very poor reproductions. When this new translation appeared in 2000 there wasn’t any convenient way to see better copies of Kubin’s drawings unless you had the earlier (and for me, elusive) Penguin edition. Thanks to Flickr we can now see reproductions from the first printing of 1909 in this set of photos. Not all the drawings are featured but the ones present are better than those in my volume. The illustrations are often rather perfunctory, and they lack the finesse and erotic weirdness of Kubin’s better known works, but a couple are as macabre as one would expect. And I love the cover design.
As to the story, it concerns an unnamed narrator who receives a request from an old school friend, Claus Patera, to leave Munich and go with his wife to live in the city of Pearl, a newly-built metropolis in a nation known as “The Dream Realm” which Patera has founded in the Far East. Having travelled there the couple find themselves in a city filled with other displaced Europeans which is at first eccentric then increasingly nightmarish. It’s the kind of book you might expect an artist like Kubin to have written, in other words, and since the narrator is a thinly-veiled counterpart of the author we can occasionally glimpse the man behind the works. Anyone interested in Kubin the artist is advised to seek it out.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Hourglass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has
• Kafka’s porn unveiled
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
Star City by Tomislav Ceranic.
• Noted in the blogosphere this week: A Journey Round My Skull underwent a transmutation into 50 Watts; a blog devoted to artist, designer & illustrator Jessie M King; “The arts and musicks of the supranatural” at Secret Lexicon; From the Farm, Railroads, Sewing Machines & Beyond, lengthy reminiscences from a long life in America.
• Barney Bubbles in Wonderland, in which the designer and his chums indulge in some Carrollian shenanigans somewhere in the 1960s. The resulting footage is now a promo video for Balloon Race by Bear Driver.
• HP Lovecraft’s favourite words, the desert island books of Jorge Luis Borges, a profile of Christopher Isherwood, and Edward Gorey again.
[Arthur] Machen explicitly talks about the strength of London, as opposed to Paris, in that London is more chaotic. Although he doesn’t put it in these words, I think what partly draws him to London is this notion that, in the absence of a kind of unifying vision, like Haussmann’s Boulevards, and in a city that’s become much more syncretic and messy over time, you have more room to insert your own aestheticizing vision.
China Miéville in a great interview at BLDGBLOG.
• Matryomin is “the unique, original erectronic [sic] musical instrument invented by Masami Takeuchi in 2000”. Yes, a theremin inside a Russian doll. The Mable ensemble playing Duke Ellington’s Caravan is, well…I’m still speechless. And there’s also this.
• Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument.
Discordia by Tomislav Ceranic.
Amazingly enough, prostitution was legal during the Victorian period. There were tons of brothels all over the major cities of England, and of all different kinds. There were lots of flagellation brothels; these were places where primarily men would go to be whipped by women or by men. There were also gay male brothels. You could go to a park in London at night, pick up what were called the “park whores” and give them a very small amount of money to have sex openly in the park. I also write about gay “cruising,” which was quite common. If you knew the right place to go and knew the right signals, you could pick up a man on the street and have sex in an alley.
Deborah Lutz is interviewed about her book Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism.
• Cult-ure: Ideas can be dangerous, a book by Rian Hughes.
• Chernobyl: Europe’s strangest wildlife refuge.
• The Eadweard Muybridge Online Archive.
• Caravan (1959) by Martin Denny | Caravan (1961) by 80 Drums Around The World | Caravan (1962) by Sir Julian | Caravan (1965) by The Ventures | Caravan (1973) by Enoch Light & The Light Brigade | Caravan (1997) by Jimi Tenor (I could go on and on, yes I could…)
Turin exposition poster by Leonardo Bistolfi.
Part two of a two-part skate through the contents of volume 10 of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. In addition to the Heinrich Vogeler feature which was the subject of yesterday’s post, this edition includes articles on the Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna in Turin—another international showcase for the Art Nouveau style—and a feature on the Viennese Secession exhibition of the same year. This latter piece was especially fascinating when seeing such a notable event reported for the first time. There’s more about that below. This volume also includes a piece on the Glasgow Arts and Crafts movement but the photos for that piece are poor quality. As before, anyone wishing to see these samples in greater detail is advised to download the entire volume at the Internet Archive. There’ll be more DK&D next week.
A feature on dress design shows some rare examples of Art Nouveau style being applied to clothing.
Continue reading “Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #10: Turin and Vienna”