Aubrey Beardsley – Page 18

Ave Arthur!

The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (detail, 1881–1898) by Edward Burne-Jones.

Arthur magazine announced its demise this week: “He died as he lived—free, high and a-dreaming of love, ’neath vultures’ terrible gaze.” The magazine lapsed for a while in 2007 then returned but this time it seems things are more permanent. Running a magazine of any kind is never easy, and they don’t always last long—the UK run of the legendary Oz only managed 48 issues to Arthur‘s 32—but it’s a dismal fact that certain tastes are rarely catered for or encouraged in this world. Supermarkets stock multiple titles devoted to women’s hair or tin boxes with wheels but you’ll have to hunt elsewhere for copies of Sight & Sound or The Wire. This isn’t a sign of any kind of new barbarism, if you look to history you’ll find The Savoy magazine publishing Aubrey Beardsley’s art and literature alongside contributions from future Nobel Prize winners yet it only managed eight issues; New Worlds magazine struggled during its run in the 1960s and 1970s, and while it may never have officially died (not while Michael Moorcock lives and breathes) it’s safe to say that it would struggle anew if re-launched today. If this is the end then let’s celebrate what’s been done, and hope it may inspire something new.

Issues #1–25.

The Arthur archives will be available online in the future. In the meantime, the favourites among my own contributions were MBV Arkestra (cover illustration), The Aeon of Horus, Out, Demons, Out (cover illustration), Brian Eno, and Sir Richard Bishop.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Savoy magazine
• Dodgem Logic
• The Realist
• A wake for Arthur
• Oz magazine, 1967-73

Weekend links 49

Star City by Tomislav Ceranic.

• Noted in the blogosphere this week: A Journey Round My Skull underwent a transmutation into 50 Watts; a blog devoted to artist, designer & illustrator Jessie M King; “The arts and musicks of the supranatural” at Secret Lexicon; From the Farm, Railroads, Sewing Machines & Beyond, lengthy reminiscences from a long life in America.

• Barney Bubbles in Wonderland, in which the designer and his chums indulge in some Carrollian shenanigans somewhere in the 1960s. The resulting footage is now a promo video for Balloon Race by Bear Driver.

• HP Lovecraft’s favourite words, the desert island books of Jorge Luis Borges, a profile of Christopher Isherwood, and Edward Gorey again.

[Arthur] Machen explicitly talks about the strength of London, as opposed to Paris, in that London is more chaotic. Although he doesn’t put it in these words, I think what partly draws him to London is this notion that, in the absence of a kind of unifying vision, like Haussmann’s Boulevards, and in a city that’s become much more syncretic and messy over time, you have more room to insert your own aestheticizing vision.

China Miéville in a great interview at BLDGBLOG.

• Matryomin is “the unique, original erectronic [sic] musical instrument invented by Masami Takeuchi in 2000”. Yes, a theremin inside a Russian doll. The Mable ensemble playing Duke Ellington’s Caravan is, well…I’m still speechless. And there’s also this.

• Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument.

Discordia by Tomislav Ceranic.

Amazingly enough, prostitution was legal during the Victorian period. There were tons of brothels all over the major cities of England, and of all different kinds. There were lots of flagellation brothels; these were places where primarily men would go to be whipped by women or by men. There were also gay male brothels. You could go to a park in London at night, pick up what were called the “park whores” and give them a very small amount of money to have sex openly in the park. I also write about gay “cruising,” which was quite common. If you knew the right place to go and knew the right signals, you could pick up a man on the street and have sex in an alley.

Deborah Lutz is interviewed about her book Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism.

• Cult-ure: Ideas can be dangerous, a book by Rian Hughes.

• Chernobyl: Europe’s strangest wildlife refuge.

• The Eadweard Muybridge Online Archive.

• Aubrey Beardsley at Tumblr.

• Caravan (1959) by Martin Denny | Caravan (1961) by 80 Drums Around The World | Caravan (1962) by Sir Julian | Caravan (1965) by The Ventures | Caravan (1973) by Enoch Light & The Light Brigade | Caravan (1997) by Jimi Tenor (I could go on and on, yes I could…)

Echoes of Aubrey

More of Aubrey Beardsley’s posthumous influence and more of the delightful collision between the 1890s and the 1960s. Monsieur Thombeau turned up this striking fashion shoot from LIFE magazine for 1967 showing a model posed against one of the Salomé drawings. A couple of days after this was posted, a reader wrote to point me to this list of films featuring Beardsley artwork. Most of those I knew about already but I certainly hadn’t heard of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977), a low-budget horror film about which we’re told:

A large, black, four-poster bed, possessed by a demon, is passed from owner to owner. The demon was a tree, who became a breeze and seemingly fell in love with a woman he blew past. The demon then took human form and conjured up a bed. While he was making love with the woman she died and his eyes bled onto the bed, causing it to become possessed. Those who come into contact with the bed are frequently consumed by it (victims are pulled into what is apparently a large chamber of digestive fluids beneath the sheets). The bed demonstrates a malevolent intelligence as well as some psychokinetic and limited telepathic abilities to manipulate dreams. A running commentary or chorus is supplied by the ghost—if that is the correct word—of an artist (who would appear to be Aubrey Beardsley, though this is never stated directly) trapped behind a painting on the wall.

That’s a posthumous fame Aubrey never would have anticipated. If anyone has seen this, let us know what you thought.

Carry On Loving (1970).

Absent from the list of films is Ken Russell’s Salome’s Last Dance, which features the Salomé pictures again in its title sequence, and Carry On Loving, one of the dreadful British sex comedies which has an entire scene set in a modish pad decorated with Beardsley prints. Watch the scene in question here, if you must.

The prints were produced by a London company, Gallery Five, in the late 60s, and their ad shows they were also selling works by Kay Nielsen (seen in the Carry On clip), John Austen, Charles Ricketts, George Barbier, Jessie King and others. Gallery Five did much to popularise Beardsley’s art among people who might otherwise have never noticed his work, and their products turn up in many films and TV dramas of the period. Finally—although it’s by no means the last word on this subject—the V&A has two great Beardsley-derived ads for Elliott Boots by Paul Christodoulou here and here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Aubrey Beardsley archive

After Beardsley by Chris James

I have Greg Jarvis of Flowers of Hell to thank for prompting this discovery. Greg left a comment on an earlier post about Aubrey Beardsley’s influence in the musical world in which he drew my attention to some Flowers of Hell cover art and a video inspired by Beardsley’s Morte Darthur drawings. The video reminded me of a short animated film I’d known about for years but never seen, After Beardsley by Chris James. Sure enough it too is on YouTube, to my great surprise since I swear I’ve searched in vain for this in the past.

After Beardsley was made in 1981 and my knowledge of the film is a result of its being praised by V&A curator Stephen Calloway. The picture of Aubrey in a hospital bed featured in the 1993 V&A exhibition High Art and Low Life: The Studio and the fin de siècle, and is also the final picture in Calloway’s 1998 biography of the artist. Chris James describes the film thus:

The film After Beardsley attempts to depict today’s world through Beardsley’s eyes and in his drawing style…Beardsley is ‘resurrected’ from his death bed and begins to walk through time to the present. On his journey he witnesses the evolution of the car and of air and sea travel, then climbs a phallic mountain before descending into 20th century New York City. [The] ghost of Aubrey Beardsley explores the urban jungle of New York City where, amongst other things, he sees Bob Dylan as a satyr sitting by an iconic 1959 Chevy, and Lenny Bruce being injected with heroin. He is then beckoned by Patti Smith (as Beardsley’s Messalina) into a hospital room where he finds himself hooked up to life support equipment. His hospital persona shows his ghost the horrors of the present day—overpopulation, pestilence starvation, and death. Via John Lennon, he sees the horrors of a nuclear winter. The premise of the film is that, if Beardsley had been alive today instead of the 1890s, modern medicine would have kept him alive, but that, having had a glimpse of where the world was heading, he may have chosen to die anyway. Written and drawn by Chris James, after Aubrey Beardsley. Music by Ronnie Fowler.

As Beardsley pastiche the drawing is some of the best I’ve seen, it’s easy to see why Calloway would be impressed. The film is split into three parts here, here and here, and Chris James has more animation on his YT channel. I’d be tempted to ask for a better quality copy but for now seeing the film at all is good enough.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Aubrey Beardsley archive

Illustrating Poe #5: Among the others

The Conqueror Worm (c. 1900) by František Kupka.

Poe’s illustrators are legion, you could easily devote an entire blog to nothing but depictions of his stories and poems. By way of rounding off this week of posts I thought I’d point to some of the works which have caught my attention over the years, several of them being obscure enough to warrant further investigation.

František Kupka’s drawing is, as far as I can gather, one of a series based on Poe’s poem; this seems to be a related piece. As with many Symbolists artists, you can spend a great deal of time scouring the available resources to find more of their work. We’re told that one of Kupka’s more well-known paintings, The Way of Silence (1903), was inspired by the poem Dream-land.

Berenice (1905) by Alberto Martini.

Alberto Martini (1876–1954) is a fascinating artist whose work bridges the decline of Symbolism and the rise of Surrealism. He’s also another talent whose work is woefully underrepresented on the web so let’s hope that changes soon. Wikipedia describes him as having produced 135 Poe illustrations of which only a small handful are visible online, and most of the ones that are go unlabelled. I know this one is for Berenice since I have it in a book but any Poe reader should guess the title from those blazing teeth. A few more of Martini’s drawings can be seen here.

Continue reading “Illustrating Poe #5: Among the others”