Salomé – Page 18 – { feuilleton }

Wildeana 6

“The rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates.” Above and below: illustrations by Charles Robinson from The Happy Prince and Other Tales, an edition from 1920.

Continuing an occasional series. I’ve yet to see a copy of the recent annotated and unexpurgated edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray but Alex Ross wrote a marvellous essay for the New Yorker about the novel, its creation, its public reception, and Wilde’s decision to tone down the overt homoeroticism of its earlier drafts. This is one of the best pieces I’ve seen for a while about Wilde, replete with choice detail:

The gay strain in Wilde’s work is part of a larger war on convention. In the 1889 story “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” a pseudo-scholarly, metafictional investigation of Shakespeare’s sonnets to a boy, Wilde slyly suggests that the pillar of British literature was something other than an ordinary family man. In the 1891 play “Salomé,” Wilde expands a Biblical anecdote into a sumptuous panorama of decadence. Anarchists of the fin de siècle, especially in Germany, considered Wilde one of their own: Gustav Landauer hailed Wilde as the English Nietzsche. Thomas Mann expanded on the analogy, observing that various lines of Wilde might have come from Nietzsche (“There is no reality in things apart from their experiences”) and that various lines of Nietzsche might have come from Wilde (“We are basically inclined to maintain that the falsest judgments are the most indispensable to us”). Nietzsche and Wilde were, in Mann’s view, “rebels in the name of beauty.”

As for the novel, I’m feeling rather Dorian Grayed-out at the moment, having recently completed ten illustrations based on the story for a forthcoming anthology. More about that later.

Elsewhere, the William Andrews Clarke Memorial Library in Los Angeles has been running an exhibition, Oscar Wilde & the Visual Art(ists) of the Fin-de-Siecle, since July, and will continue to do so until the end of September. No word about what’s on display but this page on their website has details of their collection of Wilde materials which they say is the most comprehensive in the world.

Finally, the majority of visits to these pages in recent days have come from this post about Ivan Albright’s astonishing Dorian Gray painting in the Art Institute of Chicago. The post links to an earlier one of mine about the paintings used in Albert Lewin’s 1945 film of the book.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive

Wilhelm Volz’s Salomé

Wilhelm Volz (1855–1901) was a German artist whose work I might not have paid any attention to at all had this lithograph not been featured in that cult volume Dreamers of Decadence. As a composition it’s a lot more interesting than Volz’s paintings, the circle for a halo being an unusual detail. There’s also more of an atmosphere of horror in this representation than one usually finds with the Salomé theme. The temptress doesn’t seem very enamored of her trophy, and John the Baptist’s head for once bears a suitable expression of horror. Volz’s print was published in Pan magazine in 1896, the entire edition of which may be viewed here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive

Jean-Philippe Guillemain’s dancers

Mathieu by Jean-Philippe Guillemain.

A collection of male dancers pose beside the usual complement of agency models in the portfolio of French photographer Jean-Philippe Guillemain. Are all European dancers this attractive or does he just have a good eye? See the others on his site.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Danseur Noble
• The tights have it
• Torero
• Eonism and Eonnagata
• Tiger Lily
• Chris Nash
• Peter Reed and Salomé After Dark
• Felix D’Eon
• Dancers by John Andresen
• Youssef Nabil
• Images of Nijinsky

Valenti Angelo’s Salomé

And still they come… Valenti Angelo (1897–1982) was an American printmaker, author of several books for children and the illustrator of an estimated 250 classic works of fiction including this 1945 edition of Wilde’s Salomé for Heritage Press. Angelo has an engagingly simple style in this and other works, reminding me of David Sheridan’s Tarot designs. The Internet Archive has a copy of his illustrated The Imitation of Christ with drawings reminscent of Eric Gill’s woodcuts.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The Oscar Wilde archive
• The Salomé archive

Dalí’s Salomé

Queen Salomé (1937) by Salvador Dalí.

Of all the Surrealists, Salvador Dalí had his fingers in the most cultural pies—designing for film and theatre, writing books (including a novel, Hidden Faces), even performing occasionally, or at least making a public spectacle of himself—so it’s no surprise to find him adding to the stock of 20th-century Salomé interpretations, first in a drawing then for the stage. The stage work was something I hadn’t run across before (not since this current obsession began, anyway), a 1949 production of the Strauss opera at Covent Garden directed by Peter Brook. The now celebrated theatre director was at the outset of his career when he chose Dalí as his designer but the resultant furore shows that Brook’s ability to challenge an audience (or at least, a gaggle of theatre critics) had an early start. The critics savaged the production and the show closed after only six performances. Brook, who was sacked, had this to say:

The critics all decided that Dali and I were only out to annoy them. There, at least, I might claim that they underestimated us; if that have been our intention I think that between us we might have done much worse… (More)

Getty Images has some tantalising photos here, here and here, but I’ve not seen anything in the way of production sketches. The objections seem to have been the usual tiresomely English revulsion against anything too original, too strange or too imaginative (it’s no wonder Leonora Carrington abandoned Britain for Mexico). An article about the production from the BBC’s Music Magazine includes this detail:

In the last scene for Dali and Brooke, [Salomé] was slowly covered over by a sort of green ooze of bile that came from the head of John the Baptist, an effect of luxuriant disgust which we can imagine without too much difficulty, bearing in mind others of Dali’s images.

That piece also mentions a proposed restaging of the opera with Dalí’s designs but I’ve been unable to discover whether this took place. If anyone knows better, please leave a comment.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive