Jean Lorrain – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 672

Le Vice Errant (1902) by Vincent Lorant-Heilbronn.

• “So however surreal those cities, the invisible ones that he builds, they have their counterpart in the real. They always have their counterpart in visible cities.” Darran Anderson on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on the centenary of The Riddle and Other Stories by Walter de la Mare, with special attention paid to The Vats, a very strange story.

• New music: A Bad Attitude by African Head Charge; Lapsed Gasps by Push For Night + Jon Mueller; Forevervoiceless by Brian Eno.

The strands of medicine, consciousness expansion, intoxication, addiction, and crime were tightly entangled in fin-de-siècle Paris, where ether and chloroform circulated among bohemian demi-mondaines alongside morphine, opium, cocaine, hashish, and wormwood-infused absinthe. These solvents were often carried in small glass vials and medicine bottles by the asthmatic, tubercular, and neurasthenic, added to patent tonics and syrups, and, on occasion, to cocktails: an ether-soaked strawberry floating in champagne produced a heady rush, the fruit preventing the volatile liquid from evaporating too quickly. Literary references to ether abounded, either as a signifier of decadence or as a literary prop to shift a realistic narrative into the landscape of dreams and symbols, where its dissociative qualities became a portal to strange mental states, psychological hauntings, uncanny doublings, and slippages of space and time.

Mike Jay on Jean Lorrain and the ether dreams of fin-de-siècle Paris

• At Aquarium Drunkard: Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan talk about the recording of Silver Haze, their first album as Sqürl.

• James Balmont offers a beginner’s guide to the films of Dario Argento.

• At Unquiet Things: Rachael Bridge’s Luminous, Technicolor Shadows.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by Erika.

• Ether Ships (1978) by Steve Hillage | Ether (1998) by Redshift | Ether (2000) by Coil

Weekend links 563

Cover art by Jeffrey Schrier for the 1975 reissue of Zero Time by Tonto’s Expanding Head Band.

• RIP Malcolm Cecil, electronic musician, and producer of Stevie Wonder, among many others. The term pioneer is over-used when discussing electronic artists, but it’s an accurate one when applied to Cecil and his partner in Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, Robert Margouleff. The first Tonto album, Zero Time (1971), was a collection of fully-realised all-electronic compositions recorded in the days when “electronic music” in the rock sphere usually meant rock-band-plus-synth-burbles. As I said in a post about Tonto’s debut album a few years ago, “Jetsex sounds like an outtake from Kraftwerk’s Autobahn (albeit three years early) while Timewhys wouldn’t have been out of place on The Human League’s Travelogue album almost a decade later”. Cecil may be seen in this short film showing off the bespoke synth gear that comprised The Original New Timbral Orchestra (aka TONTO), while he talks at length about his career in issue 4 of Synapse magazine here. Cecil and Margouleff parted company in the mid-70s shortly after releasing a second album, It’s About Time (1974), a collection of jazzy instrumentals that’s overdue a proper reissue.

• “Every film production company they showed it to said it was ‘too weird’ to ever be made. ” Next month Strange Attractor publishes The Otherwise, a script by Mark E. Smith and Graham Duff for an unmade horror film.

• More horror: Predator’s Ball by Uni; music video as horror scenario in which you can play spot-the-reference: Alice in Wonderland, Rocky Horror, Leigh Bowery (?), Pasolini’s Salò (?)…

• At Bibliothèque Gay: Narkiss by Jean Lorrain, another homoerotic classic newly translated into Spanish, and with new illustrations.

• The week in Gary Panter: Nicole Rudick on Gary Panter’s Punk Everyman, and the man himself writing about his life and art.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine investigates the connections between Charles Williams and Sax Rohmer.

• At Dangerous Minds: New Age Steppers, “the only ever post-punk supergroup”.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 689, a feast of funk compiled by Steve Arrington.

• At Public Domain Review: Agostino Ramelli’s Theatre of Machines (1588).

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Pier Paolo Pasolini Day.

• Valentina Magaletti’s favourite music.

• Louvre site des collections

• Narcissus Queen (1958) by Martin Denny | Narciso (1974) by Pierrot Lunaire | Narkissos (2006) by Sadistic Mikaela Band

Weekend links 532

An alchemical illustration from Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652) by Elias Ashmole.

• “Originally the idea was to do four parallel feuilleton stories, linked at the beginning of each episode by still shots connecting with the other episodes, rather like the old serials.” Jacques Rivette mentions a familiar word during a 1974 discussion with Carlos Clarens and Edgardo Cozarinsky about Out 1 and Céline and Julie Go Boating. I watched all 775 minutes of Out 1 last year, followed by a re-viewing of Céline and Julie, so this was good to read. Elsewhere: “The dizzying Céline and Julie Go Boating is apt viewing for a chaotic present,” says Phillipa Snow.

• Away is a wordless feature-length animated film in which a boy is pursued by a lumbering monster after parachuting from a crashing aircraft. It was directed, written, edited, animated and scored by Gints Zilbalodis. Christopher Machell reviewed the film here. Watch the trailer.

• Jean Lorrain’s novel of Decadent dandyism, Monsieur Bougrelon, receives a new English translation by Brian Stableford for Side Real Press. (The Spurl translation by Eva Richter was reviewed here a few years ago.) The new edition includes illustrations by Etienne Drian (1885–1961).

• El Topo again, among other things: Mike Soto on the anti-Western genre set in America’s surreal borderlands. Cormac McCarthy is a surprising absence from Soto’s lists despite almost all of his later work being concerned with the border region.

• “Whatever their pursuits, they were extremists who created literature that wasn’t so much great as it was relentless. Even now they make passive reading impossible.” Chris R. Morgan on Swift, Sade and the art of upsetting people.

• The best batch yet? Sean Kitching talks to Gary Lucas and Eric Drew Feldman about the recording of Captain Beefheart’s Doc At The Radar Station.

• Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich… Photographer Sandro Miller persuaded John Malkovich to recreate 41 famous photographic portraits.

• An extract from Rated SavX in which Edwin Pouncey/Savage Pencil talks with Timothy d’Arch Smith about his artistic evolution.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Pat O’Neill Day.

• Siavash Amini‘s favourite music.

• Get Away (1970) by Ry Cooder | Running Away (2002) by Radar | Fly Me Away (2005) by Goldfrapp

The art of Antoon van Welie, 1866–1956

The Artists’ Studio (1906).

This week’s post is another by Sander Bink about a neglected artist of the Dutch fin de siècle. There’s no need for me to add a great deal to Sander’s appraisal below other than to point out the evident debt that Antoon Van Welie seems to owe to the Pre-Raphaelites for whom Ophelia was a popular subject. British artists of the 19th century have often been criticised for adding little to the evolution of Continental art but the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts movement pervades European Symbolism. My thanks again to Sander for the post.

* * *

Antoon van Welie (Dutch Wikipedia only) was a Dutch painter known mainly for his portraits of the rich and famous. Around 1900 his work was praised by writers and critics such as Camille Mauclair, Jean Lorrain and Anatole France. He had studios in The Hague, London, Paris and The Vatican. There’s not much information about him in English, and for a long time there wasn’t a great deal in Dutch either, since during his lifetime he was already more or less forgotten. His being openly gay could have been one of the reasons. Male beauty is one of his subjects, as illustrated by The Artists’ Studio. His preference for depicting Catholic priests and flamboyant society ladies might also have been a little too extravagant for Dutch artistic standards of the period. The influence of Symbolism and mysticism on his work sets him a little apart from the crowd as well. All this does make him somewhat of a “decadent” or fin de siècle artist. What surely did not help his posthumous fame was a portrait of Mussolini he painted in 1921, and apparently he later also made one of Hitler. But in 2003 he was rescued from art-historical oblivion by the good people of the Louis Couperus Museum in The Hague. An exhibition there was followed in 2007 by a larger one at Museum Het Valkhoff in Nijmegen: The Last Decadent Painter. The book published for the occasion gives an extensive overview of Van Welie’s life and oeuvre but is unfortunately only available in Dutch.

The portraits which made him famous in his day are, in my opinion, technically not that great and sometimes tend toward kitsch. More subtle and beautiful are his early Symbolist works which, like those by Simon Moulijn, are strongly influenced by Maeterlinck’s neo-mystical writings.

Aglavaine en Sélysette (1899).

Some quite refined examples are the lithograph Aglavaine en Sélysette and the pastel Les Princesses de Légende, both directly inspired by Maeterlinck’s plays.

Les Princesses de Légende (1899).

Ophelia.

Literature was an important influence, as it was for many other Symbolist painters, and Van Welie duly produced the pastel Ophelia in 1898–’99. The same goes for musical themes, an example of which is the serene pastel Holy Cecilia with Lyre.

Holy Cecilia with Lyre (1899).

He also designed book covers like the one for Jean Lorrain’s novel Ellen from 1906.

La Douleur (1895).

But his most attractive work and as far as I am concerned one of the finest works of 1890s Dutch art is the chalk drawing La Douleur. Although the title emphasizes the young lady’s suffering, she also seems to be in a (sexual) ecstasy. A paradoxical beauty like Baudelaire’s femmes damnées: “de terribles plaisirs et d’affreuses douceurs”.

Sander Bink

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Simon Moulijn, 1866–1948
• René Gockinga revisited
• Gockinga’s Bacchanal and an unknown portrait of Fritz Klein
• More from the Decadent Dutch

Weekend links 357

Ruth St Denis (2010) by Agnieszka Brzezanska.

• As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics is an exhibition of occult-oriented art at IMMA, Dublin. “An alternative history of art of the last century,” says Aidan Dunne.

• THIS IS THE SALiVATION ARMY: a Tumblr archive of Scott Treleavan’s queer-pagan-punk zine, 1996–1999.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 219 by Paper Dollhouse, and a Mika Vainio Tribute Mix by broken20.

• Valdimar Ásmundsson’s Icelandic translation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula has been translated back to English.

• First evidence for higher state of consciousness found (thanks to psychedelic drugs).

• At Bibliothèque Gay: Narkiss (1908) by Jean Lorrain.

• Boyd White on finding Arthur Machen’s bookplate.

• Barry Adamson’s favourite albums.

• John Waters: By the Book.

• Dread: Lustmord in dub.

• XXY Oscilloscope

• Vampire (1976) by Devon Irons | Keep On Dubbing (1976) by Augustus Pablo | African Dub (1977) by The Silvertones