From Un Autre Monde (1844) – J. J. Grandville
Image sourced here.
See also: Grandville – 1844
Category Archives: art
Piranesi
Death and the maiden trope
Death and the Maiden (1512) – Niklaus Manuel Deutsch
Image sourced here.
In the frescoe of Berne, a skeleton kisses the virgin on her cheek and grabs her full breasts.
Image sourced here.
Death and Woman (1517) – Hans Baldung Grien
A maiden is a female virgin (though originally it referred to males as well), or to any young woman.
This theme [death and the maiden] has a multi-faceted past. It is rooted in very old mythological traditions: among the ancient Greeks, the abduction of Persephone (Proserpine among the Romans) by Hades (Pluto), god of Hell, is a clear prefiguration of the clash between Eros and Thanatos. The young goddess gathered flowers in company of carefree nymphs when she saw a pretty narcissus and plucked it. At that moment, the ground opened; Hades came out of the underworld and abducted Persephone. — http://www.lamortdanslart.com/fille/maiden.htm
Persona (1966) – Ingmar Bergman
Persona (1966) – Ingmar Bergman [Amazon.com]
The first time an erect penis appeared in a non-pornographic film was in 1966, when Ingmar Bergman included a brief image of an erection in Persona, though the offending image was censored from all British prints of the film for over thirty years. –Matthew Hunt
Regarding Matthew Hunt’s comments, I was looking for the erect penis in this Youtube footage, but could not spot it, maybe this is the censored version. Anyone? I dislike Bergman instinctively (but have only seen maybe two or three of his films) but I liked this opening sequence. I wonder who did the music.
Typography question
Unidentified digital typography from 1974
Can anyone tell me what the name of this typeface is?
Shusaku Arakawa
Extremely interesting piece of visionary architecture by Japanese architect Shusaku Arakawa at the Rossignol weblog. Shusaku Arakawa is the director of the 1970 experimental film Why Not?. A Google gallery of his work here.
Indeep, Penguin covers, Youtube and Don Quixote
From my Google reader:
Dadanoias on Penguin covers, The Laughing Bone on Don Quixote, with illustrations by Peter Howson, Honoré Daumier and Gustave Doré, Eva Deadbeat on a new female Youtube comic duo and Mr. Dante Fontana with Indeep’s 1983 Last Night a DJ Saved My Life.
Enjoy
Orlando Furioso and the fantastique
Ruggiero Rescuing Angelica (1819) – Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Orlando Furioso (1877) – Gustave Doré
Orlando Furioso (“Mad Orlando” or “The Madness of Orlando” ) is an epic poem written by Ludovico Ariosto in 1516. It is a “gionta”, a sequel, to Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love), but it is quite distant from the other work in that it does not preserve the humanistic concepts of knight errantry.
Related: Orlando Furioso
Don Giovanni on Arte TV last night
Yesterday evening I landed on Arte TV (a Franco-German TV network, which aims to promote quality programming related to the world of arts and culture) and today I found out that I was watching Mozart’s Don Giovanni which Arte describes as:
Revisité par René Jacobs et mis en scène par Vincent Boussard, le chef-d’oeuvre de Mozart renvoie singulièrement à notre époque. Un Don Giovanni qui mêle sensualité et violence, humour et tragédie.
The reason I kept on watching (I normally don’t go for opera) is twofold: 1. I have been listening since six months to state-run Belgian art/classical music/jazz radio station Klara so my ears have gotten used to these sounds; 2. the striking appearance of the decors (very reminiscent of the Dr. Caligari film of the 1920s) with the slanted angles and unusual lighting.
Wikipedia has this on Don Giovanni :
Don Giovanni is an opera in two acts with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. It was premiered in Estates Theatre in Prague on October 29, 1787.
Don Juan is a legendary fictional libertine, whose story has been told many times by different authors. The name is sometimes used figuratively, as a synonym for “seducer“.
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote a large essay in his book Either/Or in which he – or at least one of his pseudonyms – defends the claim that Mozart’s Don Giovanni is the greatest work of art ever made.
The finale in which Don Giovanni refuses to repent has been a captivating philosophical and artistic topic for many writers including George Bernard Shaw, who in Man and Superman, parodied the opera.
Sade / Surreal (2001) – Various
Sade / Surreal (2001) – Various
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Found the excellent German non-fiction book titled Sade / Surreal. Der Marquis de Sade und die erotische Fantasie des Surrealismus in Text und Bild. It is a 2001 book on Sade published by Tobia Bezzola, Michael Pfister, Stefan Zweifel with text by Michel Delon, Ursula Pia Jauch, Tobia Bezzola, Jacques Mayer and Stefan Zweifel.
Porte de sortie du parc des plaisirs, de la chasse du Prince
One of the many illustrations that grace the book above, image sourced here.
Why is it excellent. Lots of illustrations. I will give the list of all the work I was not familiar with:
- French photographer Eli Lotar’s Les abattoirs de La Villette (1929)
- French Visionary architect Jean Jacques Lequeu’s Le Dieu Priape and Trois images du sexe féminin and some illustrations of his use of sexual symbolism in architecture.
- Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s Cannibales dépeçant leurs victimes and a painting of a woman about to have her throat cut.
- Illustrations for Sade’s novels by French painter and illustrator Claude Bornet.
- Work by French painter and engraver Jean-Baptiste Tierce
- A portrait of French writer and contemporary of Sade Marie-Dorothée de Rousset
- Images of French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel 1960s happening 120 minutes dédiées au divin Marquis at the Festival de la libre expression. Lebel seems to have been the Otto Mühl of France during that particular era.
- Very transgressive photography by French photographer Charles François Jeandel [Google gallery] and Boing Boing link here.
- Works by German Weimar period artist Rudolf Schlichter [Google gallery]
- A sculpture by French ‘medical artist’ André Pierre Pinson, La Femme assise which I was familiar with through the cover illustration of Rachilde’s novel Monsieur Vénus.
- An illustration by all-time favourite Hans Bellmer for Georges Bataille’s Solar Anus. With a few exceptions I’ve always liked his drawings better than the dolls.
- Work by Czech painter, poet, editor, photographer, and graphic artist Jind?ich Štyrský [Google gallery]
- Work by Romanian painter Victor Brauner. [Google gallery]
- Work by Danis painter Wilhelm Freddie
- And the 1938 L’Ultrameuble by Swiss painter Kurt Seligmann, a stool supported by three stockinged mannikins’ legs in high-heel shoes.
See also: Sade – surrealism