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Weekend links 286

One of Faig Ahmed‘s melted Azerbaijani rugs.

• “I asked [William Burroughs] about the future of typography and he said that letterforms would go back to hieroglyphs, similar to the ancient Egyptians.” Jonathan Barnbrook discussing the thinking behind his design for blackstar, the new David Bowie album.

• “…a thick, yellow fog fills the air, sinks, crawls on the very ground; at 30 paces a house or a steam-ship look like ink-stains on blotting paper.” PD Smith review London Fog, a history of the capital’s lethal pea-soupers by Christine Corton.

• At Rue Morgue: Dejan Ognjanovic asks seven writers and editors why HP Lovecraft is still relevant. Related: big thanks to Paul Gallagher for plugging my Lovecraft calendar at Dangerous Minds.

• Some end-of-year weirdness from Moon Wiring Club: Into The Chattering Ground, a sample of the new releases available at the MWC website.

• Elaine Lustig Cohen: accidental graphic designer. Related: book covers and other designs by Elaine Lustig Cohen.

• The tomb that architect John Soane built for his wife inspired the shape of Gilbert Scott’s red telephone box.

• Mix of the week: Stephen O’Malley at the controls of Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone on BBC Radio 6.

• At Dirge Magazine: S. Elizabeth talks to Alice Rogers about art and occultism.

• Simon Callow on taking 25 years to write a three-volume life of Orson Welles.

• Todd Haynes on Cate Blanchett, Saul Leiter and Queer Cinema.

• Le Freak (1978) by Chic | Freak (2003) by LFO | Jovan Freak (Rune Lindbaek Nomaden Mix) (2012) by Georges Vert

Slowly Rising

Burgeoning plant life, fungal forms and flights of insects fill the screen in this vivid animation by Hideki Inaba. The music is by Beatsofreen. (Via Full Fathom Five)

Trois peintres visionnaires, a film by Fabienne Strouvé

Another gem of an arts documentary, Trois peintres visionnaires is a companion film to Mati Klarwein, peintre Américain: both films feature Klarwein and Ernst Fuchs, while this one also includes another artist, Austrian Arik Brauer (credited as Eric in the titles). As with yesterday’s film there’s a small extract from Popol Vuh’s Hosianna Mantra on the soundtrack plus one of the Cluster and Eno recordings. The three painters are shown performing an impromptu Tibetan (?) chant inside Mati Klarwein’s Aleph Sanctuary then talking together inside Fuchs’ resplendent museum where the Aleph Sanctuary was housed for several years. As before, the conversation is in French but you also get to see Fuchs at work, and there’s a roaming closeup of one of his jewelled paintings.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mati Klarwein, peintre Américain, a film by Fabienne Strouvé
• Ernst Fuchs, 1977
• The art of Mati Klarwein, 1932–2002

Mati Klarwein, peintre Américain, a film by Fabienne Strouvé

And speaking of the 1970s and Ernst Fuchs and Mati Klarwein… Fabienne Strouvé’s Mati Klarwein, peintre Américain is a 25-minute portrait of Mati Klarwein and family made in 1979. Despite being filmed in New York City most of the conversation is in French—the Klarweins being fluent speakers—but if you like Klarwein’s art this is still a wonderfully insightful film. I always wonder about the size of paintings and other technical details so it’s good to see that, yes, many of Klarwein’s later works are larger than you might expect from reproductions, and it’s also instructive to see him at work with a portion of his painting covered by masking tape. Ernst Fuchs makes a couple of appearances (speaking French—”psychédélique!”), and you get a brief Mati guide to some of the paintings that comprise the incredible Aleph Sanctuary.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ernst Fuchs, 1977
• The art of Mati Klarwein, 1932–2002

Ernst Fuchs, 1977

I try to avoid buying even more big art books when I already have shelves groaning under the weight of the things but this one was unavoidable. I’d been after Draeger’s Ernst Fuchs (1977) for some time but whenever I went searching for a copy all the available ones were prohibitively expensive. The news of Fuchs’ death earlier this month prompted a new search which revealed a copy that was astonishingly cheap: £17.50 (!) for a large, heavy and very lavish art book that’s been out of print for years. Even with the postage this was still a remarkable bargain.

After taking delivery of it today I’m even more surprised since the book is better than expected, with heavy paper throughout and numerous colour plates. The text is in German, of course, but that’s not a problem when there are so many beautiful reproductions of favourite pictures. An exceptional production with a dust jacket of deep metallic gold beneath which you find a Fuchs design blocked onto the boards, front and back.

Something I realised looking through the pages is that this is yet another of the art books that provided pictures for the early issues of Omni magazine. Mati Klarwein’s God Jokes was published in 1976; Giger’s Necronomicon had its first English edition in 1977, the same year as the Fuchs book; Bob Venosa‘s Manas Manna appeared in 1978; Omni showcased work by all these artists and others like them, and was the first place where I and many other readers would have seen their paintings. One of the pictures in this Fuchs collection appeared on the cover of Omni #6 in March, 1979. The 1970s was, among other things, a great period for this type of fantastic art.

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