Oscar Wilde – Page 12 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 174

Dress (2012) by Nao Ikuma.

• Two of my Cthulhu artworks can currently be seen in the Ars Necronomica exhibition at the Cohen Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI. The exhibition is part of NecronomiCon, and runs to September 13th. In related news, my steampunk illustration has been nominated in the Visual category of this year’s Airship Awards. Winners will be announced at Steamcon V in October.

• “…the story of how a small cabal of British jazz obsessives conducting a besotted affair with the style arcana of Europe and America somehow became an army of scooter-borne rock fans…” Ian Penman looks back at the culture of Mod for the LRB.

• “What is it about the writer in the First World that wants the Third World writer to be nakedly political, a blunt instrument bludgeoning his world’s ills?” Gina Apostol on Borges, Politics, and the Postcolonial.

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3–4 hour days.

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

• Ron Rosenbaum talks to Al Pacino about all the usual stuff, and reveals some detail about the actor’s obsessive interest in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé.

• More queer history: The Brixton Fairies and the South London Gay Community Centre, Brixton 1974–6.

• At Dangerous Minds: Anthony Burgess and the Top Secret Code in A Clockwork Orange

• Every day for 100 days, Jessica Svendsen redesigned a Josef Müller-Brockmann poster.

• LondonTypographica: Mapping the typographic landscape of London.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 083 by Demdike Stare.

• At Strange Flowers: Alfred Kubin the writer.

• Derek Jarman’s sketchbooks.

• Rick Poynor on Collage Now.

• Thomas Leer: Private Plane (1978) | Tight As A Drum (1981) | Heartbeat (1985)

Ads for The Yellow Book

More Beardsley ephemera, and more from the recently upgraded NYPL Digital Collections. These US ads for The Yellow Book date from late 1894 to early 1895, a couple of months before Oscar Wilde was arrested and Aubrey Beardsley had to leave the magazine despite having no connection with Wilde’s activities.

What’s most interesting for me about these ads is the small vignettes, two of which I’m sure I haven’t seen before. This suggests that there’s still material in the pages of The Yellow Book which has been overlooked despite the many books which collect Beardsley’s art. The Internet Archive has several volumes of the magazine but I’ve been daunted in the past by its thousands of pages of not-so-interesting Victorian prose. (The Savoy was the superior publication where quality of writing was concerned.) Maybe it’s time to take a deep breath and dive in.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Aubrey Beardsley archive

Atget’s corners

Un coin, rue de Seine (1924).

Photographer Eugène Atget had a thing for the architectural promontory, as do I for that matter, and this photo of a street corner in the rue de Seine, Paris, has always been a favourite. Atget liked the location enough to photograph it at least twice from different angles. The long exposures bleach the sky and turn passing figures into ghostly blurs.

Coin rue de Seine (1924).

Opening up Google Maps to see how the street looks today left me astonished when I realised I’d walked past this very corner without realising it was the location of Atget’s photos. The rue de Seine is one of two streets giving access to the rue des Beaux-Arts, the location of L’Hôtel where Oscar Wilde died. Matters weren’t helped by my walking in the opposite direction to this view so I didn’t notice the narrow corner. In any case the street looks very different today from Atget’s gloomy intersection.

Maison d’Andre Chenier en 1793–97, rue de Cléry (1907).

Equally as clean and unremarkable is another narrow building in the rue de Cléry which in 1907 was sporting some kind of wooden structure on its upper floor. Google’s cameras tend to diminish whatever space they photograph but the streets seem smaller today when cluttered with bollards, cars, bikes and the ubiquitous green bins of Paris.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Rue St. Augustin, then and now
• Brion Gysin’s walk, 1966
• L’Hôtel, Paris

Several more Salomés

Cover of Salome by Oscar Wilde (1903) by Modest Alexandrovich Durnov.

Gathering a few more Salomé renderings which have caught my attention recently. The biggest surprise is the one from Picabia since he’s an artist who these days is almost always associated with the Cubists and Dadaists. In the 1920s he returned to figurative painting and produced a number of pieces in this style. The overlaying of images reminds me of some of Hans Bellmer’s drawings.

Michael Zulli is an American comic artist whose work I’ve always liked a great deal. No information about his drawing, unfortunately, so I can’t say whether it’s a one-off or part of a larger project.

Salomé (1917) by John Riley Wilmer.

Salomé (c. 1928) by Francis Picabia.

Salomé Sphinx (1928) by Nicholas Kalmakoff.

Salomé (no date) by Michael Zulli.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive

Le Cantique des Cantiques

An oddity from the career of František Kupka, Le Cantique des Cantiques (1905) in this version is a stage presentation of the Song of Solomon by Jean de Bonnefon. Kupka provided a series of illustrations in a style similar to his Symbolist paintings which in the original printing are decorated with coloured borders. The copies here are from a bad scan at Gallica whose page I’ve been unable to find again. For the moment there are better copies to be seen at eBay. The drama is very much oriented towards the sexual exotica which Oscar Wilde had rendered notorious in Salomé, and which underpins so many of the obsessions of the period. A few years after this Kupka was in a different world entirely, following new directions into abstract art.

Continue reading “Le Cantique des Cantiques”