Aubrey Beardsley – Page 14

Year by Angus MacLise

The Ascension of St Rose of Lima (1896) by Aubrey Beardsley.

There’s something about the idea of renaming the calendar that I find very attractive even if this is only workable on a personal level. When the Gregorian calendar is a reinvention of the Roman calendar based around Christian holidays (and with the days of the week still alluding to Norse gods), it’s easy to feel at liberty to start again.

Year (1962) by Angus MacLise.

The most famous example of calendrical reinvention is the French Republican Calendar which called upon a gathering of scientists, a mathematician and a gardener to rename the months and days of the year. In this system the 29th of July would be “Panic” (ie: the plant Switchgrass) in the month of “Thermidor” which runs from July 19th to August 17th. (For the record, this is the year 221 in French Republic time.) The French Republican Calendar may have been an inspiration for the Pataphysical Calendar invented by Jarryites (or Ubuists) which is also French, and a sight more complicated:

The pataphysical era (EP) started on 8 September 1873 [Alfred Jarry’s birthday.] The week starts on a Sunday. Every 1st, 8th, 15th and 22nd is a Sunday and every 13th day of a month falls on a Friday. Each day is assigned a specific name or saint. For example, the 27 Haha (1 November vulg.) is called French: Occultation d’Alfred Jarry or the 14 Sable (14 December vulg.) is the day of French: Don Quichote, champion du monde.

The year has a total of 13 months each with 29 days. The 29th day of each month is imaginary with two exceptions:

• the 29 Gidouille (13 July vulg.) is always non-imaginary
• the 29 Gueules (23 February vulg.) is non-imaginary during leap years

So today, July 29th, would be 16th Tatane (“Shoe” or “Being worn out”), Transfiguration de St V. van Gogh, transmutateur, in the Pataphysical Year 140.

Month XI from Year by Angus MacLise.

After the Pataphysical Calendar, Year by percussionist/composer/poet Angus MacLise (1938–1979) comes as a relief. This is a poetic renaming of the days of the year which MacLise published in a now very rare booklet edition in 1962. I’ve known about this for years but still haven’t seen a full text so it was a surprise to discover that the cover illustration was The Ascension of St Rose of Lima by Aubrey Beardsley, one of the artist’s later pieces which tends to Catholicism despite being used to illustrate his unfinished erotic novel, Under the Hill. It’s difficult to say why this was chosen by MacLise or his publisher, but it pre-empts the renewed attention that Beardsley’s work received from 1966 on. MacLise’s names for the days are beautifully evocative, and infinitely preferable to the many days which few in this country bother about:

smoke of the shore
day of the inner lid
day of the magic child
day of bessie smith
day of anna
rose over the cities
the fire is a mirror
hrungirs heart

The full text for November and December can be found on this page. If anyone knows of an online source for the full text of MacLise’s Year then please leave a comment. For those with Android phones, there’s a page here offering a Pataphysical Calendar app. Bosse-de-Nage says “Ha ha”.

My White Bicycle

My White Bicycle (1967), poster by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. Too risqué for EMI.

In what passes here for spare time I’ve been working on a private project that concerns events in London during a single week in 1967. I won’t elaborate for now but the research has been fun, and has led down byways where it’s easy to get lost in a profusion of historic detail. The International Times archive is a great time-sink if you want to see London’s psychedelic culture evolving from one week to the next. Oz magazine covered much of the same ground but in broader strokes; IT being a weekly paper was the closest thing the underground of the time had to a journal of record which means you’ll find things there which weren’t reported anywhere else.

International Times, Volume 1, issue 13, 19/05/1967.

A brief item about a poster for the debut single by Tomorrow caught my eye, the artwork being an early piece by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (Michael English and Nigel Waymouth) who we here discover were briefly known by another name:

MY WHITE BICYCLE

EMI join the long and growing list of those self-censors who still believe that the younger generation are going to continue to support them. The above poster for the Tomorrow record, MY WHITE BICYCLE, was rejected by EMI on the grounds that the titties might provoke “complaints from certain organizations…” So Jacob and the Coloured Coat (Mick English and Nigel Weymouth [sic]) put on their crocheted boots and manufactured a poster design from every phallic image they could. Subliminal pornography triumphed where open indecency had failed and the prick within sustains where the exposed breast falters.

Tomorrow were one of the first British psychedelic bands. My White Bicycle is their most memorable song but the rest of their self-titled debut album still holds up today. Ace guitarist Steve Howe became a lot more famous in Yes a few years later, while drummer Twink was in a host of bands in the late 60s and early 70s, Hawkwind included. My White Bicycle sounds superficially like a typical piece of psych whimsy à la Pink Floyd’s Bike (both songs were recorded at Abbey Road) but according to Twink there’s an anarchist subtext:

“My White Bicycle” was written out of what was actually going on in Amsterdam. One of the owners of Granny Takes a Trip, Nigel Weymouth [sic], had gone there and come back with a Provos badge which he gave to me. They were kind of like a student anarchist group that believed everything should be free. In fact, they had white bicycles in Amsterdam and they used to leave them around the town. And if you were going somewhere and you needed to use a bike, you’d just take the bike and you’d go somewhere and just leave it. Whoever needed the bikes would take them and leave them when they were done.

What would have been dismissed as pure utopianism now looks like prescience when bike-sharing schemes have become a reality. As to the redrawn poster, there’s a copy here which is described as very rare, hence its absence from other Hapshash galleries. Not really as phallic as the IT report implies; Aubrey Beardsley got away with a lot more priapic subterfuge in the 1890s when the strictures were also more severe.

My White Bicycle (1967), the replacement poster by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat.

On the same page of IT there’s a brief announcement that The Beatles will have a new album out in June, something entitled Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. That album also gave EMI a headache with both Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and A Day In The Life being accused by “certain organisations” of promoting drugs. If the record company could have seen the greater headache that was coming less than ten years later from Malcolm McLaren and his King’s Road scallywags they might not have been so uptight.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hapshash Takes a Trip
• Michael English, 1941–2009
• The Look presents Nigel Waymouth
• The New Love Poetry

The art of Ted Coconis

This poster for Massimo Dallamano’s 1970 updating of The Picture of Dorian Gray was featured here several years ago, and it’s taken me all this time to finally discover the name of the artist responsible, Ted Coconis. Better late than never. It could be argued that the illustrations below for Nabokov and Goldman tend more towards the artist’s own interests than representing the content of the books; I’ve not read Goldman’s novel (or seen the film) but online comments suggest that this was an unsuitable cover; Nabokov’s Ada is an erotic novel which presents its eros in a manner that’s a lot less direct than the painting implies. All I can say to this is that strict accuracy is for pedants; Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Wilde’s Salomé aren’t in the least accurate yet they’re regarded as definitive. Sometimes illustrators are trying to convey in pictorial form an otherwise intangible impression of a book (or a film or play) which is what I see Ted Coconis doing here. There’s a lot more of his work at his website. It’s gorgeous stuff.

Cover illustration for Ada by Vladimir Nabokov.

Pola Negri.

Cover illustration for The Princess Bride by William Goldman.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

George Barbier’s Falbalas et Fanfreluches

George Barbier’s work has been a regular visitor to these pages. Falbalas et Fanfreluches was a series of pochoir print portfolios published from 1922–1926, a catalogue of various liaisons and amours with a mildly erotic tone. There’s also some sly humour in the examples below, such as the tiny dogs menacing a dandy in L’Agression, and the eyes of the woman in Romance sans paroles wandering to the trim backside of the posing sailor (who doesn’t seem so interested in her).

In addition to being beautiful drawings, Barbier’s title has solved for me a minor conundrum: Falbalas et Fanfreluches means “Ruffles and Frills”, and the Abbé Fanfreluche is a suitably ruffled and frilled character in Aubrey Beardsley’s unfinished erotic novel Under the Hill.

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Posters: A Critical Study, 1913

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An appraisal of the state of poster design from almost a century ago by Charles Matlack Price. Lots of the names you’d expect from Europe and the United States—Steinlen, Mucha, Beardsley, Will Bradley, Maxfield Parrish, etc—plus a number of examples I hadn’t seen before. Also a surprising scarcity of Italians and Germans. Scroll down for a remarkably advanced dancer with a guitar by Will Bradley from 1895, a design that anticipates the flourishing of Cubism and abstracted graphics a few years later. Price’s book may be browsed here or downloaded here.

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