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Rebel Ready-Made

I think I spotted across this one while searching for more Robert Hughes, in which case I offer grudging thanks to the algorithms of the Great Panopticon. If you’ve ever seen Marcel Duchamp talking about his work in an arts documentary then it’s probable that the clip will have been taken from this film. (The Shock of the New is no exception.) Rebel Ready-Made was directed by Tristram Powell for a short-lived BBC arts series, New Release, and broadcast in June 1966 to coincide with a major Duchamp retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London. It’s fascinating for number of reasons, mostly the way that Duchamp is happy to talk about his sporadic art career, an occupation that in its mature phase consisted of spasms of invention followed by increasing boredom and a wandering off to do something else. The ease with which he did all this—the inventions which in other hands would have fuelled entire careers, and then the eventual abandonment of the whole art game—always made a sly mockery of the self-importance that sustained the art world in the 20th century.

Elsewhere in the film you get praise for Duchamp from Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, plus the artist’s friend Richard Hamilton, seen briefly painting the replica of The Large Glass that appeared in the Tate exhibition as a substitute for the fragile original. This has been my favourite of Duchamp’s works since I saw the replica in the Tate a decade later. Having a duplicate stand in for the original isn’t such an unusual thing for Duchamp when most of his ready-made sculptures are also copies, the “originals” having been lost or destroyed shortly after their first exhibitions. From the 1930s on, Duchamp had also been making multiple copies of all his works in miniature for the various iterations of the Boîte-en-valise, or portable museum.

Tristram Powell was lucky to capture the artist being so talkative at such a late date. Two years after this Duchamp was dead, although there was one last surprise in store. Jasper Johns referred to Étant donné as “the strangest work of art in any museum”. Duchamp never acknowledged the existence of this life-size peepshow while he was alive, preferring it to be announced to the public only after his death, which is what happened in 1969. There are no replicas of this one; if you want to see it (or the parts of it the artist allows you to see) you have to go to Philadelphia and peer through the holes in the door.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Televisual art
• Chance encounters on the dissecting table
• The Witch’s Cradle by Maya Deren
• Audio Arts
• 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements
• Anémic Cinéma
• Dreams That Money Can Buy
• Entr’acte by René Clair
• View: The Modern Magazine

Virgil Finlay’s magazine illustrations

The Time Machine by HG Wells; Famous Fantastic Mysteries, August 1950.

This one will be popular, I’m sure. One of the recent uploads at the Internet Archive is a massive collection of Virgil Finlay’s interior illustrations from the magazines that published most of his work—Weird Tales, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Amazing Stories, etc, etc—together with the astrological illustrations he created later in his career, plus other material, including a few pieces that never appeared in print. Pencil drawings, lithographs and hundreds of meticulous renderings in ink on paper or scratchboard; 1888 illustrations in all. Whoever put the haul together has been much more thorough than I’d have expected. Rather than a stash of random drawings you get 10 separate folders (best appreciated in the cbz format; see the note below) with each illustration tagged with the name of the story it was illustrating, and the date of publication. The contents are a mix of reproductions from later reprints, together with cropped pages from magazine scans. Taken together, this must comprise almost all of Finlay’s published work excluding his magazine covers and other paintings.

Earth’s Last Citadel by Henry Kuttner and CL Moore; Fantastic Novels Magazine, July 1950.

Virgil Finlay (1914–1971) can be a frustrating artist for anyone who admires his work. He was massively prolific, and maintained a high level of quality for almost 40 years; but his interior illustrations were often printed on pulp stock, the kind of paper that offers the worst kind of print reproduction, and which darkens and eventually crumbles into dust unless it’s carefully stored. Descriptions of his illustrations often note that his drawing style evolved to compensate for the deficiencies of the printing but much of his artwork was very finely rendered, and I’m not sure his minute stipple effects would have printed any better (or worse) than the traditional cross-hatching which he used from time to time. His drawings have at least been well-served by reprint collections, where the white art paper makes his striking compositions leap off the page. Inevitably, the best of these—Gerry de la Ree’s seven-volume collection from the 1970s, and a four-volume set from the 1990s—are all out of print. The sheer quantity of illustrations also presents a problem for any reprint collection: what to include…or leave out? All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this accumulation of his interior art may be unauthorised, and even frowned upon by some, but it benefits Finlay by keeping his work in circulation and showing the full range of his career.

The Faceless God by Robert Bloch; Weird Tales, May 1936.

With 1888 illustrations to choose from, picking out a representative selection is a hopeless task, so what you see here are a few favourites. I said that Finlay maintained a high level of quality but there are unsuccessful Finlays, especially in the early years when his style was still evolving. (It should be noted that he was in his early twenties when he was creating pieces such as these. His errors are a lot less grievous than mine were at the same age.) One of the hallmarks of the Finlay style is a frequent use of photo-reference, especially for faces, and it’s the disjunction between faces and bodies which occasionally jars. Disparities between the size or angle of a head and a body are common in photo-collage but you don’t expect to see them in a drawing. Occasionally the disparities worked for him, as in his illustration for The Faceless God by Robert Bloch, a drawing that so impressed HP Lovecraft that he responded with a short poem praising both picture and artist. The reference images used for his later work are much more seamlessly integrated, and in the 1940s and 50s he seemed to be using posed models as frequently as the illustrators for the big American magazines.

The Man Who Mastered Time by Ray Cummings; Fantastic Novels Magazine, March 1950. Remove the fungi from this illustration and you’d have an almost abstract image.

Regarding cbz or cbr files: these are simply folders filled with jpegs or pngs which have been zipped then given a new suffix. They can be browsed using a suitable comics-reader application; I use Simple Comic for the iMac and ComiCat for the tablet. The files can also be opened with any unzipping software to give you access to the images inside. I find these files so much easier to use than pdfs, especially for image-heavy publications, that I’ve taken to exporting pdf pages as jpegs then zipping a folder of the images into a cbr. One of the advantages of the cbr format is that the readers allow you to extract an image without unzipping the whole file. The only drawback with the Finlay files is that ComiCat doesn’t let you see the file name the way that Simple Comic does.

Full Moon by Talbot Mundy; Famous Fantastic Mysteries, February 1953.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Virgil Finlay’s Tarzan
• Virgil Finlay’s Salomé
• The monstrous tome

Weekend links 616

Illustration by Virgil Finlay for The Face in the Abyss by A. Merritt; Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1940.

• “The pier was completely outside of the gallery system, which David loved of course. People were just working on the walls, nothing was for sale, nothing could really be bought, although people were coming in and trying to chip things off the walls.” Cynthia Carr on the love letters and legacy of David Wojnarowicz.

• “In pursuit of Pure Form, the Polish artist known as “Witkacy” would consume peyote, cocaine, and other intoxicants before creating pastel portraits.” Juliette Bretan on the artful intoxications of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz.

• Kino Kyiv: Christopher Silvester compiles a list of notable Ukrainian films. I’ve not seen all of these but Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors is a great favourite.

Onscreen for nearly the entire runtime, [Laura Dern] pulls off the remarkable feat of being in total control of a scenario organized by undermining her identity, obliterating her characterization, and so scrambling the distinction between Nikki and Susan that one eventually comes to view Inland Empire not as a maze to exit, a puzzle to solve, an ouroboros to gawk at, but rather as both a generalized treatise on the enigma of acting and a very specific, exquisitely perverse mash note to one of Lynch’s most formidable collaborators.

Nathan Lee on Laura Dern, David Lynch and Inland Empire. I’ve always thought Dern’s exceptional performance might have been recognised more widely if Lynch hadn’t filmed most of it on low-grade video.

• New music: Golden Air by Sun’s Signature, a new project from Elizabeth Fraser and Damon Reece.

• Miranda Remington explores The Strange World of…Stomu Yamash’ta.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Boucan.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Labyrinthine.

• Labyrinth (2010) by Chrome Hoof | Labyrinths (2018) by Jonathan Fitoussi / Clemens Hourrière | The Seventh Labyrinth (2019) by Pye Corner Audio

Michel Henricot, 1936–2022

Deux Personnages (1974).

Jan of JKK Fine Arts was in touch this week to inform me that the French artist Michel Henricot died in February, a month before the opening of an exhibition of his work organised by JKK Fine Arts for the International Cultural Centre in Cracow, Poland.

Le Voyageur IV (1996).

I first encountered Henricot’s work in the pages of OMNI magazine where he was one of several featured artists who can be grouped together as “fantastic realists”—Ernst Fuchs, Mati Klarwein, HR Giger, Robert Venosa, Rudolf Hausner, De Es Schwertberger—although the label wouldn’t have necessarily been agreed to by any of them apart from Fuchs and Hausner, both of whom were members of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism in the 1960s. Henricot’s sombre and obsessive figure studies were a good fit for the magazine, with the science fiction context lending his paintings suggestions of the futuristic or alien that might otherwise be absent in the empty space of an art gallery.

The artist photographed by Jan K. Kapera.

Despite such a high-profile showcase Henricot’s work has never been as visible as his more famous contemporaries so I’m grateful to Jan for supplying additional information, including the artist’s actual birth date, 8th July, 1936, rather than the erroneous dates found all over the internet. Henricot was friends with Leonor Fini, an artist whose work was also preoccupied with the human figure, often just as stylised and set against featureless monochrome backgrounds. Like Henricot, Fini’s art gets tagged as Surrealist even though her own obsessive paintings evolved away from any particular school. Henricot’s Les Promeneuses (1954) was definitely reaching for a Dalínean/Delvaux-like quality, but if his mature work belongs anywhere it’s with that small collection of French artists who don’t comprise any defined movement but who share a taste for the fantastic, the strange and the inexplicable: Sibylle Ruppert, Jean-Marie Poumeyrol, Jean-Pierre Ugarte, Gérard Trignac, Erik Desmazières, Jean-Paul Faccon, Pierre Clayette, Raymond Bertrand, Roland Cat, Gilles Rimbault, Jean-Michel Mathieux-Marie, and others. If I was given the opportunity to put together an art show for a French gallery (or even the Pompidou Centre…), these are some of the artists I’d choose.

Le Silence (1979).

Henricot will be running at the International Cultural Centre, Cracow, until the end of April.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Saint Sebastian in NYC
• The art of Michel Henricot

Splendid Suns

I answered a few interview questions recently for Shunga Gallery, a site concerned with the erotic side of Japanese prints, and with contemporary practitioners who work in a similar areas. (All NSFW, needless to say.) I’m not really an erotic artist but Marijn has selected a few examples of my artwork that contain prominent erections, going back to the badly-proportioned drawing of the Great God Pan that I did in 1986 for my late friend, Ed, when he was part of a Dutch music & performance group, Abrahadabra. The drawing appeared in the zine of the same name, and later provoked mild disapproval from the organisers of a video festival in Den Haag where Ed and friends were using it as a flyer to promote their activities. Also at Shunga Gallery are a few pages from the rebarbative Reverbstorm, a book that’s the darkest and nastiest thing I’ll ever do. Some of that artwork provoked a rather more serious form of disapproval, as I explain in the interview.

Continue reading “Splendid Suns”