Category: {theatre}

Theatre

Passage 10

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My good friend Ed Jansen writes to inform me that a new edition of his web (and occasionally, print) magazine Passage has appeared. Contents can be seen above: musician Steven Brown, a member of the excellent Tuxedomoon with a separate solo career; artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare who’s been featured here several times; mythical hero Odysseus and playwright, poet and actor, Antonin Artaud. Since Ed is Dutch, the contents are also largely in Dutch but at { feuilleton } we try to be at least occasionally international. The Steven Brown section includes some English language material and the magazine is worth a look for the pictures, especially the Spare work which includes a number of examples I haven’t seen before. Once again I can’t help think that Spare is long overdue a serious monograph from the likes of Thames & Hudson.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Austin Spare’s Behind the Veil
• Another playlist for Halloween
• Austin Osman Spare

The Feminine Sphinx

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Colette.

Work this week designing a CD of readings from Colette had me searching books for pictures of the author. Of the few I found this is the most interesting, one of several Colette portraits made by photographer Leopold Reutlinger and one of at least two from 1907 which Colette used to promote her Moulin Rouge pantomime, Rêve d’Égypte. (You can see another one here.) The Egyptian theme explains the sphinx pose and her costume but there’s no indication as to whether the pose was borrowed from Franz Stuck’s famous painting (below) or whether the resemblance is coincidental.

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The Sphinx by Franz Stuck (1889).

Stuck produced two nearly identical paintings on this theme; the other version is here in a rather muddy copy. I like the frame design for this one which explains in pictures the secret of the famous riddle which the Sphinx asks of Oedipus, “Which creature goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three in the evening?” Stuck painted another sphinx picture three years earlier, The Kiss of the Sphinx, which portrays a less feminine and distinctly more rapacious hybrid.

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Ida Rubenstein.

Colette was famously bisexual and so too was dancer Ida Rubenstein. In the same book as the Colette picture, there’s this photo of Ida recumbent in a sphinx-like pose in a very exotic boudoir. Photographs such as these are the material connection between the extravagances of the fin de siècle and the Decadent strain of early cinema in works such as Cabiria (written by Ida Rubenstein’s friend Gabriele D’Annunzio), Intolerance and (of course) Alla Nazimova’s Salomé.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Heidi Taillefer
• Dorian Gray revisited
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• The art of Giulio Aristide Sartorio, 1860–1932