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Gekko Hayashi: homoerotics and monsters

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Needless to say, it’s primarily the homoerotics which concern us here. Gekko Hayashi is the name under which Japanese artist Goji Ishihara (1923–1997) produced his gay erotica, and these examples are among a small handful to be found on the web. Far more common is his Ishihara work which included some spectacular grotesqueries for the Illustrated Book of Japanese Monsters (1972) and the Illustrated Book of Hell (1975). Sate your appetite for the monstrous at Pink Tentacle.

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Hayashi/Ishihara’s work may be scarce but you can read about both his personas thanks to ComiPress, who posted an overview of the artist’s career, and Comics212, who examined the gay side of his output. There is a book collection of Hayashi’s gay art but that appears to be out-of-print. This Japanese page has many samples from the Ishihara work.

The dual career of Hayashi/Ishihara brings to mind another artist equally adept at commercial illustration and gay art, Oliver Frey. As “Zack”, Frey gained an enthusiastic audience in UK gay mags while he was also popular with quite a different audience for his illustrations in computer game magazines throughout the 1980s. He was also no slouch at painting monsters as I recall. A collection of Zack comic strips, Bike Boy, is published this month by Bruno Gmünder.

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Weekend links 26

The interior of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County “Old Main” Building, 1874. Reblogged over the past few days on numerous Tumblr postings, none of whom had bothered to find out any details about the picture. I’m with Silent Porn Star on the contextless reblogging issue.

• Keith Richards et Mick Jagger à Londres, TV interviews with the Glimmer Twins from 1968 with some remarkable footage in the second half of Jagger filming the penultimate shot of Performance. That French video site requires further exploration. Also there is a short film from 1961 with Jacques Lasry demonstrating the Cristal Baschet. Related: Jacques Doyen & Jacques Lasry play their Cristals while Arlette Thomas and others read French poetry. I wrote something about the mystery of the Cristal two years ago this week.

• Two great album cover blogs from Jive Time Records: Project Thirty-Three is “a shrine to circles, dots, squares, rectangles and triangles, and the designers that make them come to life on album covers” while Groove Is In The Art “celebrates the era when psychedelic graphics and pop art met the mainstream”.

• At A Journey Round My Skull: Night Hallucinations: illustrations by Jaroslav Šerých for Tales of the Uncanny (Prague, 1976); Snark, Strangeness and Charm, Mahendra Singh’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll and others.

Laurence Chaves illustrates De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• Austin Osman Spare: Fallen Visionary at the Cuming Museum, Southwark, London in September, “will be the largest showcase of [Spare’s] work in a public museum since his death in 1956.” Jerusalem Press are publishing an expensive monograph to accompany the exhibition.

• Freeing “Pale Fire” From Pale Fire; “the next big Nabokov controversy”. Probably not but the thesis is an interesting one.

• Quintessential ‘topiary’ in Gandalf’s Garden: Barney Bubbles, head shops and Op Art graphic design.

• Monster Brains discovered some more paintings by Thomas Häfner.

• Spaceweather’s Northern Lights gallery.

• The passion of Krzysztof Penderecki.

• More Bookshelf porn.

• White peacocks.

• Sussan Deyhim: Daylaman | Desert Equations (for Brion Gysin) (with Richard Horowitz) | An interview at WorldStreams.

Several links this week via Adrian Shaughnessy’s Twitter feed. Thanks!

Wenceslaus Hollar’s peacocks

Juno and the peacock (1665).

Wenceslaus Hollar (1607–1677) did more than just peacocks, of course, as you can discover if you browse the substantial collection of his work at the University of Toronto. Both these pieces illustrate Aesop’s fables. (See here and here.)

The jay and the peacocks (1665).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

The art of Ray Frederick Coyle, 1885–1924

Another illustrator who died young, Ray Coyle’s short life no doubt explains why his work isn’t more visible today. The first two illustrations here are from a 1920s edition of Jurgen (1919), the scurrilous fantasy novel by James Branch Cabell which has been praised by enthusiasts of ironic comedy as diverse as Aleister Crowley and Michael Moorcock.

Some of the illustrations in this Flickr set bear the date 1923 so they may have been Coyle’s last major work. Frank C Papé is the artist more commonly associated with Cabell, and while his art complements the author’s humour, Coyle’s elegant post-Beardsley style seems more suited to Jurgen’s worldly temperament.

This beautiful drawing is one of six pieces from a memorial book, To Remember Ray Frederick Coyle, published in 1926. A stunning piece of art and this rebound edition has an equally stunning cover design by Jeannie Sack. If anyone has a link to other drawings in this series, please leave a comment.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fantazius Mallare and the Kingdom of Evil

The Thief of Bagdad

It’s the poster for the 1924 film version we’re concerning ourselves with here, not the more popular 1940 adaptation directed by Michael Powell. Both films are great but I have a special affection for Raoul Walsh’s silent version and this poster design has long been a favourite for the way it manages to condense the film’s blend of storybook graphics and Art Deco exotica. I’d wondered for years who was responsible for this design; according to various poster sites it’s the work of the film’s art director Anton Grot (1884–1974). This is one of several variations (there another here and one here) and there’s also a less interesting design which is far more typical of the period.

I often recommend the 1924 Thief of Bagdad as an introduction to silent cinema, especially if you can find a decent print. Fairbanks’ production had William Cameron Menzies as production designer and his sets are enormous Arabian Nights confections replete with minarets, onion domes and filigree screens like something from an Edmund Dulac illustration. Fairbanks gives a tremendously athletic performance and the marvellous Anna May Wong plays a Mongolian slave girl. There’s a lengthy description of the film’s production here while you can find a copy of the entire film at the Internet Archive although it really ought to be seen in a version which isn’t blighted by a company logo throughout.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More Arabian Nights
• Edward William Lane’s Arabian Nights Entertainments
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• Metropolis posters