peacocks

The White Peacock

The White Peacock (1910).

A typical piece of mysterious erotica by Austrian illustrator and pornographer Franz von Bayros (1866–1924). Like all good Decadents, Bayros used peacocks and peacock feathers as decorative motifs in his pictures but this is the first I’ve seen where the peacock itself is the result of amorous attention. If that sounds overly-perverse, you haven’t seen his Sweet Snail.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kafka’s porn unveiled
• The art of ejaculation
• The art of Félicien Rops, 1833–1898

Colin Corbett’s decorated jockstraps

I missed posting something about Strapped: The Art of the Decorated Jockstrap while the exhibition was running last month at the London College of Communications but better late than never with this. Designer Colin Corbett’s playful additions to the humble jockstrap hit so many spots of obsession it’s like he read my mind: black clothes, swords, peacocks, jockstraps… You can see more of them here and he talks about some of the designs here.

Dennis Covey, meanwhile, turns jockstraps into art by making unique torso casts of their wearers. He also has a fine collection of other homoerotic work, most of which is for sale.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Game boy

Ruth St Denis

The Peacock (no date).

Dancer Ruth St Denis (1879–1968) strikes Art Nouveau poses in the New York Public Library’s Denishawn Collection, now at Flickr.

Radha (1904).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peacocks
• Rene Beauclair
• Elizabetes Iela 10b, Riga
• The Maison Lavirotte
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• The art of Hernan Gimenez
• Images of Nijinsky

The art of Dugald Stewart Walker, 1883–1937

A posting of Dugald Stewart Walker’s work this week at the always excellent Golden Age Comic Book Stories sent me back again to the Internet Archive to see if there might be further examples among their collection of scanned library books. Sure enough there’s not only a copy of the book which GACBS sampled from, Padraic Colum’s The Girl Who Sat By The Ashes, but also other fairy tale collections by Colum, including the one featured here, The Boy Who Knew What the Birds Said (1918). Colum is well-represented in the Internet Archive’s American Library section and many of his titles seem to be at least partly illustrated. A cursory glance at some of the others turned up his retelling of Greek myths illustrated by Willy Pogány.

I’m not as keen on Walker’s work as I am other artists of this period—he has a tendency to give his adult characters gnome-like features—but the line work and compositions are first class. The Boy Who Knew What the Birds Said is especially nice for its many peacock details, some of which are featured below.