A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Fashion
A brace of elegant fencers posing for an Elle Italia spread by photographer Ruven Afanador whose Torero series was highlighted here in April. Afanador’s recent work is worth a look for the set showing a model posing in an antiquated schoolroom among bones and stuffed animals. Via Homotography.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with swords archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Torero
Photography by Steven Klein, styling by Nicola Formichetti.
Not a Tom Waits album, Bondage Machine is the title of a feature in Vogue Hommes Japan which plays with bondage and fetish imagery to striking effect. What’s not to love about a huge skeletal necklace and leather underwear? Fetish gear is the aesthetic dimension of erotica and it’s always nice to see new manifestations of the form even when, as in this case, it’s largely about fashion designers flirting with the edge of acceptability.
Via the essential Homotography.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bad Boy
Les Chansons de Bilitis (1922).
I’ve posted examples of George Barbier’s Art Deco drawings before but online examples of his work outside the world of fashion illustration have been difficult to find. The Bunka Women’s University Library corrects that with a collection of high-quality scans which include a book about the artist, George Barbier, Étude Critique (1929) by Jean?Louis Vaudoyer. There’s also his adaptation of the Sapphic classic by Pierre Loüys, Les Chansons de Bilitis, from 1922. The drawings there lack the customary ardour of other adaptations but they’re marvellously elegant nonetheless, with some beautiful page designs.
Note: these books can’t be linked to individually, you need to follow the links from “Art Deco illustrated books” in their site menu.
Nijinsky (1913).
Poèmes en Prose (1928).
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Decorative Age
• Images of Nijinsky
L’Androgyne by Alexandre Séon (1890).
Related to yesterday’s post, I’ve been re-reading various books this week for details of the most curious character associated with the French Symbolist movement, novelist and occultist Joséphin Péladan (1859–1918), also known as Sâr Peladan, a Babylonian title he bestowed upon himself as more befitting his adopted role as Rosicrucian mystic. Péladan’s writings and occult art theories spurred many of the painters who banded together as part of his Salon de la Rose+Croix, a kind of anti-salon intended to stand in opposition to what the Sâr saw as the drab realism of the Impressionists and the staid historicism of academic painters. One gets the impression reading about Péladan that he was probably a rather preposterous figure—his obsession with androgyny caused him to change his forename from Joseph to Joséphin yet he kept his length of bristling beard. But, like Oscar Wilde in London, his presence in the pool of fin de siècle art creates considerable ripples. Alexandre Séon, whose frontispiece above was created for Péladan’s semi-autobiographical essay, L’Androgyne, was particularly devoted to him, as was Carlos Schwabe. Séon’s picture depicts “the androgyne Samas, stupefied by the sexual enigma”, a character with whom Péladan fully identified as he describes his youth and its apparent state of androgynous grace.
One doesn’t need a Rosicrucian salon today for examples of creative androgyny, of course, all you have to do is go to Flickr where you’ll find creatures such as the boy above from Roman Mitchenko’s photostream. The photos there are at the fashion end of the spectrum; for more of an amateur or semi-professional perspective there are groups like the Androgyny pool, and the Mommy, I want to be androgynous! pool, the latter featuring many striking boyish girls and girlish boys.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arthur Tress’s Hermaphrodite
• Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal
• Czanara’s Hermaphrodite Angel
Elly Jackson of La Roux in the recent video for Bulletproof. I’ve been enjoying La Roux’s debut album a great deal in the past week. The jacket she’s wearing is designed by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac and features the black stripes and primary colours used by Piet Mondrian (1874–1942) in his Neo-plasticist paintings of the 1920s.