Sibylle Ruppert – Page 3

The art of Gilles Rimbault

The relaxing of constraints in the 1960s produced a breed of artist which hardly seems to exist any more, invariably male and equally at home illustrating generic fantasy as producing delicately-rendered and frequently weird erotica. French artist Gilles Rimbault is one such, as was British underground artist Jim Leon, and another Frenchman, Raymond Bertrand. Unlike Leon and Bertrand, Rimbault’s work and information about the artist is frustratingly scarce. The first examples here are from covers of French science fiction magazines—also a source of work for Bertrand—while the samples below are a pair of intriguingly androgynous pieces of erotica from this page which gathers a number of similar Hans Bellmer-like works. If anyone turns up more of Rimbault’s drawings, please leave a comment.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Jim Leon, 1938–2002
• The art of Sibylle Ruppert
• The art of Bertrand

The art of Jim Leon, 1938–2002

Psychopathia Sexualis (1967).

This, dear friends, is what the art of the fantastic could give us but rarely does, something which combines the metaphysical intensity of the Symbolists with a post-Freudian sensibility to create what Philip José Farmer once called “the pornography of the weird”. Jim Leon was a British artist whose work gained prominence via the underground magazines of the 1960s, especially Oz, although he was never really a psychedelic artist as such. Many of his earliest paintings show the influence of the Pop artists, it was only later in the decade that a distinctly original and surreal imagination came to the fore. Oz was always pretty scurrilous and had no qualms about challenging the authorities with bizarre sexual imagery which other magazines would never dare to print. Leon and other artists were fortunate to have such a public forum for outré work, a few years earlier or later and they might not have found an outlet at all.

Untitled (1979).

His early work blended influences from Francis Bacon, surrealism and the baroque. Lurking there is also the English visionary William Blake, together with the obsessive Romanticism of the pre-Raphaelites. A number of his early paintings and drawings refer to William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (first published in Paris in 1959). These were just some of the ingredients of an amazing, semi-abstract, spatially complex, ritualistic, orgiastic flesh-painting, expressing highly wrought morbidity, eroticism, transcendence and ecstasy; astonishing explorations of the murkier depths of the human mind. (More.)

A Very English Visionary by Simon Wilson.

I first encountered Leon’s work thanks to David Britton’s curating of a portfolio feature in Wordworks magazine which was republished in the Savoy Books anthology, The Savoy Book in 1980. Having seen a Leon painting in a back issue of Oz I was surprised that an artist with such a powerful imagination was so little-known. It turns out that he’d been working all along, albeit far from the public gaze, having moved to Lyons in France where he spent the 1970s and 80s painting many canvases of mystical scenes similar to those produced by the California artists featured in the Visions book. None of his later work explores the darker realms of his earlier Psychopathia Sexualis drawings, and since it’s the early work that I prefer, that’s what’s featured here. These drawings and paintings bear comparison with the art of Raymond Bertrand but where Bertrand has had his work published in lavish book collections, we have to rake through back issues of magazines for Leon’s endeavours. Leon’s later paintings at least have a website which is maintained by his family.

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Frans De Geetere’s illustrated Maldoror

Calling this 1927 edition “illustrated” perhaps stretches the point seeing as Frans De Geetere’s illustrations are rather more minimal and restrained than you’d expect for Lautréamont’s proto-Surrealist masterwork. The Koopman Collection’s page for this book lists 65 Geetere’s etchings but only shows a handful. I’d like to see more of these even if the samples here are representative, Les Chants de Maldoror being a book more deserving of illustration than most.

Frans De Geetere (1895–1968) was Belgian and there’s a Symbolist lineage in this work with his naming Fernand Khnopff and other Belgian Symbolists as influences. He was also a friend of the wealthy arts patron Harry Crosby whose note about the artist promises more than the artwork here delivers:

The darkness of the forest where he was born, the sombre curriculum of the monks together with the rich darkness of ecclesiastical music, the spark of revolt kindled at the Academy of Brussels and whipped into a flame of hatred by the frescoes his father compelled him to paint in the neighboring churches, his first escape (if artists can be said to escape), the year of hunger whitewashing the walls of houses (le soleil contre le mur blanc) and, at nineteen, night duty as guardian in a maison de fous, these were, for M. Frans de Geetere, the foundation stones of that strange building men call the soul. In the madhouse he worked at his painting by day, and by night snatched unsettled hours of sleep, and in this environment developed those queer, abnormal faces that stare out at us from the pages of Maldoror. …And if “Lautreamont has liberated the imagination and dispelled our fear to enter into darkness” as Mr. Jolas so significantly remarked, M. de Geetere with a smoldering rage and fearlessness of creation followed the poet into darkness–“into the occult beyond” to quote Mr. Jolas again, “where new and demonic visions” (I am reminded of Beardsley and Redon and Alastair) “people our solitude.”

Elsewhere on {feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on {feuilleton }
• The art of Sibylle Ruppert
• Maldoror illustrated

The art of Sibylle Ruppert

Hommage à KS.

The web isn’t the best place to see works by this extraordinary German artist, most of what’s available tends to be tiny thumbnails which give no impression of the detail in her drawings and paintings. Ruppert is another artist who’s been brave enough to try illustrating Lautréamont’s Maldoror but I’ve yet to see anything of her interpretation. Given the nature of both book and pictures one might easily pair any number of her intense and erotic works with Lautréamont’s words.

La Décadence.

These are some of the better online samples, the last one coming from ~~her official site~~ (now defunct, unfortunately) which also includes some recent black and white work but little else. The curious are advised to search book dealers for print portfolios or exhibition catalogues.

Tear out (1984–87).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Maldoror illustrated

The art of Jean-Marie Poumeyrol

L’abattoir.

From ‘Visionary Art in France’, The Visionary Review, Fall 2004:

Poumeyrol shares with Margotton a fascination for the interior landscape, where dimly illuminated grottos resonate with the remains of past epochs. And yet, his barren and abandoned spaces are often redolent with signs of the artists’ own lost memories.

In his early works, Jean-Marie Poumeyrol was recognized as a master of erotica, combining hallucinogenic and macabre imagery in an unparalleled manner. But, in his maturity, the artist has displayed a marked fascination for landscapes, particularly the enclosed spaces of sewers, industrial waste and disposal plants. Yet, the amazing accuracy and finesse of rendering which enlivened his early works has not left him and, if anything, only increased with age.

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