Sidney Sime – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 746

Composition B (No.II) with Red (1935) by Piet Mondrian.

• “Red is practically faultless, save, perhaps, for one hard-to-get-excited-about foray into atmospheric free jazz (Providence), though the sprawling, epic roller coaster of emotion and dexterity that follows (Starless) surely makes up for any shortfall.” Patrick Clarke on 50 years of my favourite King Crimson album. I like Providence, the piece is part of a live performance in Rhode Island so the Lovecraft connection adds to the aura of doom that pervades the album; and the structure of the album’s second side—jazz improv followed by a multi-part, Mellotron-heavy epic—harks back to the group’s debut.

• “It’s important to challenge the common idea of an almost evolutionary procession, where modernist abstract art is somehow the climax, a new and perfectly original approach to the visual world, absolutely different from all that preceded it.” Hunter Dukes on the yellow rectangle that denotes silence in the Silos Apocalypse.

• The Art of Sidney H. Sime, Master of Fantasy, an exhibition at the Heath Robinson Museum, Pinner, London. Meanwhile, at the USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, there’s Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation.

• “I did not realize how much I had done. I am a serial polluter.” Ralph Steadman and his daughter, Sadie Williams, talking to Steven Heller about Steadman’s latest exhibition which is touring the USA.

• New music: Come Back To Me [Demo] by Broadcast; The Last Sunset Of The Year by Marcus Fjellström; Hexa by Cleared.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Artists summon mythical creatures of the Echigo region for the 2024 Wara Art Festival.

• The Italian Art of Violence: Samm Deighan on the giallo cinema boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

• Gavin Friday’s favourite albums.

• Red (1991) by Jarboe | Red Earth (As Summertime Ends) (1991) by Rain Tree Crow | Red Sun (2012) by Anna von Hausswolff

Weekend links 693

Imaginary (no date) by Sidney Sime.

• Victor Rees was in touch this week to alert me to a one-off screening of The Gourmet (previously), a cult TV drama from 1986 written by Kazuo Ishiguro and directed by Michael Whyte. The screening, which will take place at Swedenborg House, London, on 16th October, is one of a series of retrospective events based around an exhibition from 1974, Albion Island Vortex, by Brian Catling and Iain Sinclair. The film, which is connected to Sinclair’s oeuvre by its use of one of the Hawksmoor churches, will be followed by a Q&A session with Sinclair and Michael Whyte. The screening is free but places are limited so prior booking is required.

• “Alongside his thieves and vagabonds, Hotten includes religious slang, public schoolboy slang, pirate slang, equine stable slang, phrases coined by Dr. Johnson, the slang of softened oaths, workmen’s slang, stagehand slang, shopkeeper’s slang, and dozens of other argots.” Hunter Dukes on A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (1860) by John Camden Hotten.

• The Night Land, William Hope Hodgson’s “Dying Earth” doorstop, is republished in an abridged version as part of MIT Press’s Radium Age series, “proto–science fiction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935”. All the reprints come with new introductions, the one for Hodgson being by Erik Davis.

• “My partner wanted me to stop buying lava lamps. It was an expensive hobby, and we were running out of room in our apartment.” Nora Claire Miller on the lure of the lava lamp. I only own a single one but I appreciate the obsessive attraction.

• Rambalac takes his roaming camera for a walk through teamLab Planets, Tokyo, a labyrinthine exhibition featuring plenty of water (and wet feet), and a moss garden filled with large silver eggs.

• At Strange Flowers: An examination of the connections between the self-mythologising Marie Corelli and her fictional counterparts in the Mapp and Lucia novels of EF Benson.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Cabarets of Death, a book about the otherworldly cabarets of Montmartre by Mel Gordon, edited by Joanna Ebenstein.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Secret Glory by Arthur Machen.

• 10 essential Japanese reggae releases selected by Kay Suzuki.

• Mix of the week: A Fact Mix by Venus Ex Machina.

• Modern Art in Mid-Century Comics.

• RIP Michael Gambon.

• Planet Caravan (1970) by Black Sabbath | Planet Queen (1971) by T. Rex | Oszillator Planet Concert (1971) by Tangerine Dream

The Poster: An Illustrated Monthly Chronicle

Art by Mosnar Yendis.

This is the kind of thing I love to find: five volumes of a British magazine devoted to poster artists and their creations being published at a time—1898 to 1900—when the Art Nouveau style was spreading its convolvulus-like tendrils across Europe. Poster art is a predominantly commercial medium which means the articles are more concerned with the mechanics of the business than you’d find in a rival publication such as The Studio. Artists (male and female) are interviewed, trends are analysed, there are at least two features examining what the magazine calls “cribbing” (or one poster swiping from another), also a profile of the “Aerograph”, an early model of that fixture of 20th-century illustration, the airbrush. And when it comes to illustration, The Poster is as much concerned with the practice as with the posters themselves when so many of the people featured were also illustrating books or magazines. The publishers’ admiration of Aubrey Beardsley’s work is shown in the amount of mentions he receives as well as the articles they run. Beardsley had died a few months before the magazine was launched but his influence and reputation was firmly established by this time.

All five volumes of The Poster contain a wealth of pictorial material so, with the exception of the Sidney Sime drawing, the examples shown here are from the first volume alone. Below you’ll find two illustrations by Charles Robinson pastiching the Beardsley style which the magazine claims are the best imitations they’ve seen, a debatable opinion but I hadn’t seen the drawings before. The first volume also includes an interview with illustrator John Hassall, a name that few people today would recognise, while those that do may confuse him with similarly-named musicians. Hassall’s work is still known to many Britons, however, via his “Jolly Fisherman“, a poster for the Great Northern Railway promoting the seaside resort of Skegness. The Cinderella picture below is one of many Hassall pieces in the magazine.

• The Poster, Volume 1
• The Poster, Volume 2
• The Poster, Volume 3
• The Poster, Volume 4
• The Poster, Volume 5

Continue reading “The Poster: An Illustrated Monthly Chronicle”

Édifices Anciens: Fragments et Détails, Anvers

Édifices Anciens: Fragments et Détails, Anvers is a surprise for being an example of early book by the Belgian artist and author, Jean de Bosschère, which is devoid of the idiosyncratic features of the artist’s later style, a style whose curious figures, human or otherwise, make de Bosschère a Belgian equivalent of Sidney Sime. Édifices Anciens was published in 1907, and if the illustrations lack the artist’s invention the architectural details that the drawings depict are inventive in their own way, being examples of the baroque style common to the old buildings of Belgium and the Netherlands.

Anvers is the French name for Antwerp, a city with many facades that peak into those wonderful ogee flourishes, corner finials and crow-step gables that look (to English eyes) typically Belgian and very un-English. One of the few places you’ll see facades like these in England is the city of Hull whose status as a port meant traffic with the Low Countries in architectural styles as well as in goods. (Crow-step gables are a common feature of buildings in Scotland, however, a nation whose architectural idioms are the first signal to a visitor from the south that you’re in a different country.)

Édifices Anciens may be browsed here or downloaded here. For more typical examples of Jean de Bosschère’s drawing style see the links below.

Continue reading “Édifices Anciens: Fragments et Détails, Anvers”

Weekend links 499

Wild Things – Hachilympic, a poster by Tomoko Konoike for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

• Hidden Jewels in ‘The Garden of Orchids’: Steve Toase on Der Orchideengarten (1919–1921), the German magazine of fantastic art and literature. Since the article doesn’t mention it, I’ll note again that the first Anglophone appraisal of the magazine (and also the place where it was drawn to the attention of myself and 50 Watts) was in Franz Rottensteiner’s The Fantasy Book (Thames & Hudson/Collier, 1978).

• “In its furtive, sotto-voce way, Gorey’s work is in conversation with gay history, gay literary influences, and, now and then, the gay-straight tensions of his time.” Mark Dery on the attempts by Edward Gorey’s readers and critics to ignore the obvious signs of a personal sexuality in his work.

• The Apotheosis of the Grotesque: illustrator Sidney Sime interviewed by Arthur H. Lawrence in The Idler, January 1898.

Goff would experiment with form, material, structure and ornament to almost absurd degrees. Materials he used in his buildings included aviation parts, goose feathers, oil rig equipment, orange artificial turf (on the roof), lumps of coal, and any kind of glass he could get his hands on. His 1948 Ledbetter House, also in Oklahoma, features a recurring motif of vertical lines of diamond-shaped glass studs set into doors and columns. In fact they are dime-store glass ashtrays.

Steve Rose on the restoration of “outsider architect” Bruce Goff

• At the BFI: Adam Scovell on where to begin with Delphine Seyrig; Kat Ellinger on giving Fellini’s later films their due; and Matthew Thrift on 10 great Acid Westerns.

• RIP Ivan Passer and Neil Peart. A reminder that John Patterson described Passer’s Cutter’s Way as a cinematic masterpiece. So it is.

• Geeta Dayal on musician/composer Arthur Russell and yet another posthumous release.

• Haunted And Known, a new recording by Six Organs Of Admittance.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Hidden.

• 2112 (1976) by Rush | Xanadu (1977) by Rush | La Villa Strangiato (1978) by Rush