Category Archives: visual culture

Icon of Erotic Art #44

Femme damnée (huile, Louvre) Anonyme attribué à Octave Tassaert (1800-1874) by you.

Femme damnée

Icon of Erotic Art #44 is Femme damnée a painting by Octave Tassaert, or more accurately, ascribed to Tassaert.

Its title, Femmes damnées is also the title of at least two poems by Baudelaire, one from the collection Les Fleurs du mal and the other from Les Épaves. The subject matter of Femmes damnées (« À la pâle clarté ») is the forbidden love which is lesbian in nature. Its subtitle is Delphine and Hippolyte.

It is also the title of a 1885 sculpture by Rodin and a 1897 painting by Carlos Schwabe.

French erotica, and, icon of erotic art #42

In the history of world erotica I present you with Le Poitevin’s diableries.

Les Diableries Erotiques by Eugène le Poitevin (1806 - 1870)

From the Les Diableries Erotiques by Eugène le Poitevin

Eugène le Poitevin (18061870) was a French artist, author of Les Diableries Erotiques.

He is an underrated figure in the history of French erotica and his engraving above from the aforementioned Les Diableries Erotiques is icon of erotic art #42.

Diableries are an interesting genre and illustrates how — before the “invention” of erotica and pornography — body parts and the people possessing them were used for subversive purposes, here as a form of satirical pornography or pornographic satire. The genre goes back to Rabelais, although his masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel was more emetic than erotic.

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, illustrated by Gustave Doré in 1873

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, illustrated by Gustave Doré in 1873

Cardinal Armand de Rohan-Soubise by anonymous  Anonymous satirical caricature of the Cardinal Armand de Rohan-Soubise (1717-1757); this engraving is a good example of "pornography" as a tool for political subversion during France's ancien régime.

Cardinal Armand de Rohan-Soubise by anonymous
Anonymous satirical caricature of the Cardinal Armand de Rohan-Soubise (1717-1757); this engraving is a good example of “pornography” as a tool for political subversion during France’s ancien régime.

Of course, artists such as Le Poitevin deserve a place in the history of derision, a playful and benign derision that is turned toward ourselves, toward the very core of human nature. As such it is also a piece of toilet philosophy.

Remarkably, the writeup on a Poitevin engraving not depicted here in my edition of Erotic Art of the Masters the 18th, 19th, 20th Centuries Art & Artists , author and editor Bradley Smith notes “penises and vaginas fly through the air like butterflies, are gathered in baskets and, personified, play games with adults and children.” This quote echoes the following by Deleuze and Guattari, “Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration” (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 32).

Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante

Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante

Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante is a painting by Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, and Zhang An depicting 103 cultural icons. It was released without credits on the internet in 2006 as a kind of painterly mystification and became an internet phenomenon in early 2009.

The painting’s antecedents are Disputation of the Holy Sacrament (1508/1509) and The School of Athens (1509/1510) or The Parnassus all by Raphael. Here[1] is a list with all the visual sources.

At first I thought it was uninteresting kitsch and had way too many political figures to be of interest of me. But then I thought this work might make it into the list of  works of art in the collective unconscious. Besides, due too its large presence of Chinese celebrities, it can easily be regarded as an example of 21st century Chinocentrism. And I like to believe that China is the only World Power to challenge Pax Americana as we’ve known it for the last sixty years.

List of celebrities include mostly figures from the political realm, sourced here[2].

1. Socrates 2. Cui Jian 3. Vladimir Lenin 4. Prince Charles 5. Ramses or King Solomon or Sinuhe of Egypt 6. Bill Clinton 7. Peter the Great 8. Charles de Gaulle 9. Margaret Thatcher 10. Ulysses S. Grant 18. Bill Clinton 11. Bruce Lee 12. Winston Churchill 13. Raphael Sanzio or Matisse 14. Robert Oppenheimer 15. Elvis Presley 16. William Shakespeare 17. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 18. Genghis Kahn 19. Napoleon Bonaparte 20. Che Guevara 21. Fidel Castro 22. Marlon Brando 23. Lao zi or Hokusai 24. Marilyn Monroe 25. Yassar Arafat 26. Julius Caesar 27. Mike Tyson 28. George W. Bush 29. Luciano Pavarotti 30. Salvador Dali 31. Empress CiXi 32. Liu Xiang 33. Kofi Annan 34. Prince Charles 35. Ariel Sharon 36. Ho Chi Minh or Qi Baishi 37. Osama Bin Laden 38. Qin Shi Huang 39. Mikhail Gorbachev 40. Mother Teresa 41. Song Qingling 42. Otto Von Bismarck 43. Saint Peter or Rabindranath Tagore 44. Li ZhenSheng 45. Voltaire 46. Hu Jintao 47. Dante Alighieri or Julius Caesar 48. Pu-Yi or Dai Dudu 49. Saloth Sar 50. Yi Sun-Sin or Yue Fei 51. Michelangelo 52. Hideki Tojo or Hiro Hito 53. Michael Jordan 54. Dwight Eisenhower or John Calvin Coolidge 55. Corneliu Baba 56. Claude Monet 57. Mahatma Ghandi 58. Vincent Van Gogh 59. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 60. Marcel Duchamp 61. Confucius 62. Noah 63. Li Bai or Caravaggio 64. Mao Zhedong 65. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 66. Zhou Enlai 67. Marie Curie 68. Abraham Lincoln 69. Pablo Picasso 70. Steven Spielberg 71. Friedrich Nietzsche 72. Karl Marx 73. Leonardo Da Vinci 74. Joseph Stalin 75. Queen Elizabeth II 76. Lu Xun 77. José de San Martín 78. Deng Xiaoping 79. Sun Yat-Sen 80. Theodore Roosevelt or George Custer or Maxim Gorky or Philippe Pétain 81. Saddam Hussein 82. Benito Mussolini 83. Adolf Hitler 84. Guan Yu 85. Pelé 86. Bill Gates 87. Audrey Hepburn 88. Ludwig Van Beethoven or Chopin 89. Charlie Chaplin 90. Henry Ford 91. Lei Feng 92. Victor Babeş or Norman Bethune 93. Mike Tyson 94. Sigmund Freud 95. Erich Honecker 96. Vladimir Putin 97. Lewis Caroll 98. Shirley Temple 99. Chang Kai Chek 100. Leo Tolstoy 101. Albert Einstein 102. Ernest Hemingway 103. Franklin Roosevelt 104. Woman from photograph by Cartier Bresson or Mother Teresa 105. Dolly (the cloned sheep)

Introducing Ferenc Pintèr (1931 – 2008)

Ferenc Pinter by you.

Anima Mundi (2004) [source]

Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson (Italian edition cover by Ferenc Pintèr).

posted by tonto–kidd[3]

Researching Carlo Jacono in my previous post[1] brought me to the work of Ferenc Pintèr.

Ferenc Pintèr (1931 – 2008) was an Italian illustrator and painter. He is best-known for his book cover designs for Mondadori. he also designed tarot decks for Italian publisher Lo Scarabeo.

Digressions:

Pop. 1280 is a novel by Jim Thompson (19061977) first published in 1964. It is a particularly bleak species of American hard-boiled crime fiction, but exhibits experimental flourishes that align it with literary (as opposed to genre) fiction, as well as occasional surrealist episodes. The unreliable narrator as a story-telling device, of which Thompson was particulary fond, is exemplary in this  novel.

Pop. 1280 was made into the French film, Coup de Torchon by Bertrand Tavernier in 1981. In that film, Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret) is an ineffectual local constable (see bumbling authority figures in comedy) with a cheating wife and laughable job. He accepts condecension from his superiors and his wife with good humor, as his antisocial personality allows him to tolerate such abuse. However, he soon realizes that he can use his position to gain vengeance with impunity, and he starts to kill everyone who has regarded him as a fool. After numerous trysts and murders, his pathology catches up with him in the film’s climax.

Carlo Jacono @80 and Italian exploitation

Carlo Jacono @80 and Italian exploitation

Segretissimo n° 75 (art cover by Carlo Jacono)

An Italian translation of Malory by American author James Hadley Chase

Cover design by Carlo Jacono

Carlo Jacono (March 17, 1929June 7, 2000) was an Italian illustrator detective novel covers and regular contributor to Mondadori’s gialli and Urania magazine.

A digression into Italian exploitation.

My interest in regional exploitation or pulp culture is that what it tells about the region where it is produced. I am searching for national stereotypes by way of their exploitation culture; regional stereotypes deduced from regional fears and desires (horror and eroticism).

Italian exploitation culture is literature and films in the “low culture” tradition originating from Italy, cultural products which address the prurient interests of its audience. A quick glance at Italian society on the one hand, which its firm anchor in puritan Christianity, and its abundance on the other hand of graphic exploitation material, quickly reveals its double standards.

In print culture there has been giallo fiction, quickly followed by adult comics, the so-called fumetti neri.

But the nature of Italian prurience is most readily revealed in Italian cinema. Genres such as cannibal films, Italian erotica, Italian horror films, giallo films, mondo films, il sexy, spaghetti westerns, sword and sandal films all went a tad further than contemporary products of European exploitation.

Had it not for the world wide web, these maligned genres would probably not have been so widely known, but if you prefer reading books to the internet, here is a list of publications on European exploitation you may enjoy.

Pierre Bourgeade III

Plexus with a contribution by Pierre Bourgeade

Plexus (? – ?)

Plexus was a French language magazine, started under the auspices of Planète science fiction magazine to which the late Pierre Bourgeade contributed.

Planète (The Planet) was a French fantastic realism magazine created by Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels. It ran from 1961 to 1972.

See also: plexus, http://journaux-anciens.chapitre.com/PLEXUS.html

Crime scenes fake and true

Crime scenes by Melanie Pullen by you.

“Half Prada” from High Fashion Crime Scenes.
(c) Melanie Pullen (in the public domain as long as the orignal author is credited)

I find Melanie Pullen‘s High Fashion Crime Scenes[1] photo series by E-L-I-S-E. Pullen is a thirtiesh American photographer noted for her series based on the reenactment of true crime scenes.

I decide to investigate.

The first thought that entered my mind is that obviously, Pullen is influenced by the aesthetics of French photographer Guy Bourdin[2], especially his take on the aestheticization of violence.

I continue searching.

A trip to the Tomorrow Museum (searching for Pullen/Jahsonic) brings  Luc Sante‘s Evidence: NYPD Crime Scene Photographs: 1914- 1918.

I hear an echo of Weegee‘s work.

Can Pullen be classified as crime photography?

And then, the work of Ashley Hope![3] Her paintings are based on crime scene photographs of murdered women, exclusively. Transgressive.

Frank Gehry @70

Frank Gehry@70

Dancing House Prague by Frank Gehry by ccwrks

Dancing House, Prague by Frank Gehry and Vlado Milunić (photo by ccwrks)

Frank Gehry (born 28, 1929) is a Canadian-American starchitect based in Los Angeles, California, primarily associated with a strain of postmodern architecture, known as Deconstructivism.

His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions. Many museums, companies, and cities seek Gehry’s services as a badge of distinction, beyond the product he delivers.

His best known works include the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in  Spain, Walt Disney Concert Hall in the United States, Dancing House in the Czech Republic, and his private residence in California, which jump-started his career, lifting it from the status of “paper architecture“, a phenomenon which many famous architects have experienced in their formative decades through experimentation almost exclusively on paper before receiving their first major commission in later years.