The art of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1781–1841
Cathedral Towering over a Town (1813).
Karl Friedrich Schinkel was a German painter and Neo-Classical architect. These paintings, produced early in his career, strongly resemble those of his contemporary Caspar David Friedrich, using landscape as a metaphor and with a similar attention to the quality of natural light. Apparently Schinkel thought too much of the resemblance; after seeing Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea he decided he could never equal Friedrich’s mastery and so concentrated solely on architecture. The picture below of the Queen of the Night is a design for Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Mercury Rev used the painting on the cover of their Secret for a Song single.
Morning (1813).
Medieval City on a River (1815).
The Queen of the Night (1816).
The Banks of the Spree near Stralau (1817).
Vintage magazine art I
Magazineart.org has a great selection of covers from the golden age of illustrated American magazines. Not complete by any means but there’s some great art and design there, and the covers of Science and Invention are especially fun. Interesting to see that the technique of having a figure or object partly obscure the magazine title isn’t a recent invention at all.
The Picture of Dorian Gray II
Oscar Wilde’s novel was filmed by Albert Lewin in 1945, a great adaptation with Hurd Hatfield playing Dorian, George Sanders as the aphoristic Lord Henry and Angela Lansbury as Sybil Vane. Lewin made a number of respectably arty films during the Forties and Fifties but Dorian Gray has always seemed the best to me, even if I am biased towards the story.
The film was shot in black and white but views of the painting were shown in colour. For the final view of Dorian’s decayed portrait he commissioned the hyper-real artist Ivan Albright (1897–1983) whose shockingly grotesque picture (below) provides a memorable climax to the film. That painting now resides in the Art Institute of Chicago.
Update: added a “before” view of the painting.
Update 2: added a link to a recent Wikipedia copy of the “after” picture that’s larger than previously available versions.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive
The Picture of Dorian Gray I
The original magazine publication, 1890.
Title page of the first edition, 1891.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive