Die große Nacht im Eimer (“The Big Night Down The Drain”) is an oil painting by Georg Baselitz. It was painted in the years 1962/1963 and hangs today in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.In October, 1963, the work, as well as the picture “Der nackte Mann”, shown in the west-Berliner gallery Werner & Katz (Baselitz first solo exhibition), was seized by the public prosecutor’s office because of immorality. The criminal proceedings ended in 1965 with the return of the pictures. Here is a photo of the painting.
Category Archives: art
The history of four-footed beasts and serpents
The legend to the series of illustrations posted above by Ian McCormick is posted below. Alternatively, you can consult these images at my Flickr account here. The enigmatic Ian McCormick posted the images to his easynet page in the late nineties when I found them. I’ve tried joining McCormick’s Yahoo group, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone there. Does anyone know of the current whereabouts of Ian?
Mandrake from Herbarius (1485).
One-eyed monster from Hartman Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum (1493).
Blemmyae, or headless monster from Hartman Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum (1493).
Long-eared Phanesians from Hartman Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum (1493).
Big-lipped monster from Hartman Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum (1493).
Sciapodes from Hartman Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum (1493).
Goat-people (satyrs) from Hartman Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum (1493).
Monstrous pig of Landseer by Albrecht Durer (1496).
Human Monsters from Gregor Reisch’s Margarita Philosophia (1517).
Cooking from Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s The Genius of Cooking (1569).
Triton and Siren from the Latin edition of Ambroise Pare’s Des Monstres et Prodiges (1582).
Lamia See Topsell’s The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents (1607, 1608, 1658).
Biddenden Maids “Pygopagous twins”.
Parastic ectopy; Siamese twins from Johann Schenk’s Monstrorum historia memorabilis (1609).
Cynocephali from Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum Historia (1642).
Goose-headed Man from Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum Historia (1642).
Hairy Man from John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transformed: or the Artificial Changling (1653).
More monsters (Fortunius Licetus, De Monstris, 1665).
Medusa Head Found in an Egg (Fortunius Licetus, De Monstris, 1665).
Elephant-headed man from Fortunio Liceti’s De Monstris (1665).
Amorphous Monster (Fortunius Licetus, De Monstris, 1665).
Bear-headed Roman Senator (Anne-Claude-Philippe, Conte de Caylus, Recueil d’antiquites, 1665)
Pope-ass and other monsters from Fortunio Liceti’s De Monstrorum causis natura (1665).
Sneering Woman (James Parsons, Crounian Lectures on Muscular Motion, 1745).
Black Albino Child (Georges Buffon, L’histoire de l’homme, 1749)
Chimera (Laurent Natter, Traite de la Methode Antique, 1754).
Miniature Count Josef Boruwlaski with his wife Islina and their baby.(18th century).
Large Man Daniel Lambert. (18th century).
The Cutter Cut Up (William Dent, 1790).
Calculating Facial Disproportion (J.C. Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, 1792).
Birthmarks (J.C. Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, 1792).
Rage (J.C. Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, 1792).
The Siamese Brothers (T. M. Baynes, 19th century).
Double Child (Nicolas-Francois Regnault, Descriptions des principales monstruosites, 1808).
Monstrous child with multiple sensory organs (Nicolas-Francois Genault, Descriptions des principales monstruosites, 1808).
Tumor (Jean Louis Alibert, Clinique de l’Hopital Saint-Louis, 1833)
Lepra Nigrans (Jean Louis Alibert, Clinique de l’Hopital Saint-Louis, 1833)
The Cholick (George Cruickshank, 1835).
The Body Politic or the March of the Intellect (T.Mclean, 1836).
Electric Kingdom ‘Postmodern Arcimboldo’. Club Flyer, 13 March 1999.
This post was inspired by Marginalia’s post on Jan Jonston.
Make it my thing
Screen capture of French television series Dim Dam, Dom
Rose Hobart (1936) – Joseph Cornell
- In recent comment exchanges between Andrej ‘Ombres Blanches’ Maltar and myself, we stumbled upon some Youtube footage I do not want to withhold from you, dear reader.
- Joseph Cornell’s ‘film remix’ Rose Hobart [Youtube]
- Ado Kyrou directed some episodes of Dim Dam Dom though not this one [Youtube] starring Gainsbourg. But one senses definitely his influence. Other director’s of this series were Eric Kahane (Girodias’s brother) and Jean Loup Sieff. –Andrej Maltar
- “When watching a film I inevitably perform an act of will on it, hence I transform it, and from its given elements make it my thing, draw snippets of knowledge from it and see better into myself… I could not begin to explain the reasons why since, contrary to Duchamp’s objects, I am not at all sure that these films, generally extremely bad ones, can have an objective value; or then I would have to work on them, make some changes in the montage, cut, accentuate, or tone down the soundtrack, finally interpret them before my subjective vision could be objectified.”–Ado Kyrou
- The Dim Dam, Dom video extracts were posted by Youtubian SpikedCandy who also treats us this superb piece of schmaltz.
- “This is the dialectic — there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” –Douglas Sirk’s nobrow quote via Andrej Maltar
Leaving some of the original text to show through
A page of A Humument
A Humument: A treated Victorian novel is an illustrated book by British artist Tom Phillips, first published in 1970. It is a piece of art created over William Hurrell Mallock’s 1892 novel A Human Document.
Phillips drew, painted, and collaged over the pages, while leaving some of the original text to show through. The final product was a new story with a new protagonist named Bill Toge, whose name appears only when the word “together” or “altogether” appears in Mallock’s original text.
A Humument was begun in the 1960’s. In 1970, Tetrad Press put out a small edition. The first trade edition was published in 1980 by Thames and Hudson, which also published revised editions in 1986, 1998 and 2004; future editions are planned. Each edition revises and replaces various pages. Phillips’s stated goal is to eventually replace every page from the 1970 edition.
Phillips has used the same technique (always with the Mallock source material) in many of his other works, including the illustration of his own translation of Dante‘s Inferno, (published in 1985).
This post was inspired by the comments section to this post by Il Giornale Nuovo.
One more image from the latest entry to that superb blog:
Detail of a woodland scene dominated by an anthropomorphic tree-figure
by Pietro Ciafferi (1600-54).
Vivid depictions of water
Anders Zorn (1860 – 1920) was a Swedish painter and printmaker in etching who painted portraits of, among others, three American Presidents. He has become famous for his nude paintings and vivid depictions of water.
Introducing Jules Michelet (1798 – 1874)
This is an updated version of a 2007 post. Hardly anything remains of the original post.
I first came across Jules Michelet by way of Georges Bataille’s Literature and Evil (1957), where Michelet is one of the subjects. This was in the early 2000s, the early days of the internet, when there were still interesting sites and blogs.
In my original post on Michelet, I gave one of the illustrations by Martin van Maële, some of which can be found here[1]. Van Maele, I wrote, is a student from Felicien Rops.
In that post, I also mentioned Jack Stevenson’s book on Häxan which confirms that the director Christensen was influenced by Jules Michelet’s book.
In that post, I mentioned Georges Bataille who said about Michelet was “one of those who spoke most humanely about evil”, a citation that comes from Literature and Evil.
But did I really?
Is it not equally possible that I discovered Michelet via Häxan (1922), said to be the first exploitation film and both based on Malleus Maleficarum (1487) and La sorcière (1862) by Jules Michelet.
Upon researching this in 2021, 14 years after my original post, it has come to my attention that Jules Michelet’s La sorcière, known in English as Satanism and Witchcraft, a Study in Medieval Superstition, is a work of proto-feminism and anti-clericalism.
Banana woman and a gentle devil
Banana Woman
A Kind Devil
Both works by Lucio Bubacco (b. 1957) , an Italian Murano glass artist. His sensual work is steeped in mythology and is erotically flavoured. A distinct series of pieces has slight sadomasochistic iconography. I saw his work today at the Alfabetagaga gallery here in Antwerp. One more link before I go. I love wikis and I love eroticism. Someone’s started a wiki (based on MediaWiki, a CMS I’m looking into for future Jahsonic developments) dedicated to big breasts. The site is called Boobpedia and is nsfw. A clear distinction is made between natural and fake breasts.
Dian Hanson on the big-breast lover:
There’s something very lovable about the big-breast lover. They tend to be open, outgoing, physical, accepting of the flaws of women, happy with the functioning female body. They like the body that gets pregnant. They like the body that gives birth. They like the body that lactates. There wasn’t the picky demand for perfection. They tended to be more rural men. They tended to live in the red states rather than the blue states. They were often slightly less educated. They were the kind of guys who in their personal ads would say, “Fats welcomed! All ages okay!” They loved mom. –Dian Hanson (2005)
Also today on Radio Centraal, Antwerp’s non-commercial independent radio station, a show by Pierre Elitair on the mid eighties revival of mid sixties garage rock with bands such the Swedish Nomads (‘The Way you Touch my Hand’), the Fuzztones, the Belgian Paranoiacs and his favourite: The Lyres (‘I want to help you Ann’).
Grimacing sculptures
This started out as a post on Gottfried Helnwein but ended up being about Messerschmidt (1736 – 1783).
An unidentified bust by Messerschmidt (1736 – 1783). One can only guess what makes a man in the 18th century make busts like this one. Wikipedia says “at about 1770-72 Messerschmidt began to work on his so-called character heads, obviously connected with certain paranoid ideas and hallucinations from which, at the beginning of the seventies, the master began to suffer.” If anything, this work reminds me of this.
Gottfried Helnwein — a beautiful image here — shares many affinities with the transgressive and hyperrealist work of Ron Mueck, Trevor Brown and Mark Ryden.
Viennese-born Helnwein is part of a tradition going back to the 18th century, to which Messerschmidt’s (another artist of the grotesque) grimacing sculptures belong. One sees, too, the common ground of his works with those of Viennese actionists Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who display their own bodies in the frame of reference of injury, pain, and death. One can also see this fascination for body language goes back to the expressive gesture in the work of Egon Schiele.
There is more ‘art’ in your typical Corman piece
Continuing my Godard thread, I came across a very amusing and irreverent reading of Godard’s Breathless by a certain Dan Schneider who first excuses himself (and I concur) by saying that “the historic importance of such a film is indisputable”
[Breathless] would still be a bad film because it is so self-conscious, so poorly written, and so poorly acted that while watching it I thought I was actually watching a Roger Corman cheapo horror flick.
Now, let me add that there is more ‘art’ in your typical Corman piece from that era, say, The Last Woman on Earth, than in Breathless because Corman’s commentary on the state of filmmaking and art was more subtle (and often unintentional). Godard, by contrast, is so garishly dying to show his audience how hip and intellectual he is that he somehow failed to put any of that hipness or intellect — or any substance, for that matter– into his film.
Godard attempts to capture ‘reality’ on film without realizing that anything filmed becomes unreal — or irreal. In fact, any form of art can never be real. To convey reality most aptly, art needs to be most affected. By shooting his film with a handheld camera while Parisians gawk at the filming-in-process, Godard ends up making the most artificial of films while trying to show the most boring aspects of life. He thus focuses on the two worst aspects of film — the artificiality of cinéma vérité and the reality of tedium — rather than the two best ones: the ‘reality’ of film as artifice and the ‘artifice’ of poetically chosen reality.
Government funding of film
I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas. –Jean-Luc Godard
Ever since high school, I have been pondering the uses and disuses of government funding of the arts. With regards to film the different policies in Europe and North America have engendered two types of cinema: European art house films and American blockbusters. A quote by a certain David Carr, a libertarian:
Many years ago, not long after I had graduated from law school, I briefly succumbed to a rather silly conviction that I was a cultural barbarian and this state of affairs could be addressed by becoming an afficianado of European cinema. I should admit that this conviction was in no small measure driven by the belief that being au fait with the work of European film-makers was a surefire way to impress the girlies.
So I started to spend much of my free time ferreting out art-house independent cinemas (of the kind that sold organic brownies in the foyer instead of popcorn) and sat through endless hours of turgid, narcolepsy-inducing, state-funded, navel-gazing about the tortured psychological relationship between a middle-aged sub-postmaster and his trotskyite revolutionary girlfriend in the seedy hostel they share with a couple of Vietnamese refugees on the outskirts of Hamburg. Or something.
These films have all amalgamated in my mind and I cannot remember the name of even a single one. After about six months, I decided that no woman was worth this level of constipation so I threw the towel in and went back to watching simplistic sci-fi blockbusters and gangster movies.
While I find Carr’s position particularly barbaric, I can understand his irritation at some European directors who excel at pompousness, seriousness and pretentiousness. Also, there seems to be no popular European cinema. Dyer and Vincendeau have argued in the early nineties that the only European popular cinema is US cinema. But surely, there has been a European popular cinema in the sixties and seventies?
On different note David Lynch is someone (whose films I like) who seems to be working within this paradigm of European artsiness and I wonder: are his films making money? Where does one find this kind of info. Here?
Also, government funding is tied in with the concept of cultural significance, the rationale being that a government can fund the cultural significant products of tomorrow.