Category: [Art]

Laugh this off

Here’s a remarkable piece of art; it’s by Gustave Doré so the “remarkable” part kind of goes without saying, and it’s called Ahasverus and His Curse of Immortality, made in 1860. Ahasverus or Ahasuerus is one of various names given to the Wandering Jew, who was cursed with immortality for mocking that Christ fellow while the latter was en route to being nailed up on that hill; I suppose this symbolises the people he’s met in his long life and vastly outlived… but what took me aback at first sight was, well, the smiley faces. And they’re not actually that, I know, when you look at the picture properly to see the details (click it to enlarge so you can do this), you realise the tombstones actually say “ci git” (here lies) and the dead person’s name… but when you look at it from a distance, damned if they don’t look like they’re smiling at him. It’s like they’re mocking him for having mocked Jesus or something. You may understand why I found this kind of disconcerting at first sight…

Art for fuck’s sake

This is a piece of classic art:

Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, or rather a variant upon the latter painted some years after the original. This, on the other hand…

This is a piece of shit, or rather a poster advertising a piece of shit, that being Walerian Borowczyk’s La bete from 1975… I’ve never understood how a basically respectable arthouse filmmaker got so trapped in the porn ghetto in the way Borowczyk did, so much so that he wound up making an Emanuelle sequel; even Jean Rollin (whose films are arguably arthouse but was not exactly “basically respectable”) never went quite that low and got out of the porn rut eventually. I don’t know who did this Italian poster for it, but when I found this via Tumblr I knew that whoever it was had evidently seen the Fuseli painting and thought it was worth ripping off.

In doing which, they arguably managed to kind of misrepresent the film a bit, cos the horse isn’t the titular beast—that’s actually some sort of rat/bear thing with a similarly mighty cock—although you do get quite a scene of two horses going at it in a not even remotely softcore manner. But looking at that poster, you might perhaps expect something else…

…and, looking at this other Italian poster for the film, you might expect that something else even more. Whoever was doing the promotional art for the Italian release was really trying to hype up that horse for some reason I’m not sure I want to contemplate…

Art for art’s sake

Someone posted this on Mastodon:

…and I found it immensely amusing because I’ve actually kind of been in the latter situation:

I produced this at the ripe old age of “3yrs 5mths” per the tag at the bottom, which must make it from March or April 1978. Deteriorated over the years, obviously, but you can still get a sense of whatever the hell it was I was trying to do. My no doubt proud parents hung it up when I got home from kindergarten with it, where some family friends saw it when they visited:

“Oh, have you been investing in modern art?”
“No, the boy did that at kindergarten the other day.”
“…Oh.”

But the really funny thing is that, many years later, I was reading a book about 20th century and was kind of struck by one image that had a similar sort of… streaky aspect to the colours, I don’t know a better way to describe it, as what my picture did. I can’t remember what the actual artwork in question was now, but I did note that the effect was produced by a technique called decalcomania, and though it apparently goes back to the 1700s it gained new life in the middle of the last century thanks to the Surrealists. I can’t remember any more how I made my own masterpiece, but it must’ve been something like decalcomania. So there you go, I used a surrealist technique without even knowing it was one; not even being aware that you’re doing surrealism must be about as surrealist as you can get…

The most annoying man on the Internet?

This guy Jash Dholani has been getting ripped on social media recently for his “masterlist” of 15 differences between good and bad art, and, frankly, with some good cause. I don’t know much about him, but the bit of digging I’ve done has been enough to give me some picture of him. For example, this response he made to his critics:

I feel for some reason this by itself adequately sums up where he’s coming from ideologically, but for further evidence I visited his Substack, which redirected me to a site called Memo’d, which appears to be kind of like Pinterest but for text instead of pictures. Jash has three main boards called Write Like A God, Critics of Modernity, and Reading List For Aristocrats, which strike me as illuminating how our man clearly sees himself. I was weirdly unsurprised to find the “Critics” board includes a post on Julius Evola, which is enough by itself to suggest Jash leans, well, fash.

Plus one of his “memos” is called “Why You Need a Hero to Emulate”, talking about Andre Malraux and T.E. Lawrence, which ends thusly:

Bottom line. Having a hero you can emulate orients and inspires humans like nothing else can. Looking for a hero to emulate? Check out the jaw-dropping achievements of Julius Caesar, or read the sharp and bracing words of Napoleon the Great.

Julius Caesar was assassinated and Napoleon exiled to a trifling island in the Atlantic Ocean 2000km from the nearest continent. Are these things Jash thinks we should also emulate? And the less said about his Jordan Peterson piece the better. But never mind that, let’s consider the good vs bad art list…

So this… thing is what other people have been ragging on him for, and no wonder. What the fuck does most of it even mean? I mean, I may be a bit weird in this respect but in general art does NOTHING for my mood per se, neither improving it nor making me feel weird. That’s not how I respond to art. Also, “boosts energy”—what, is Michelangelo’s David supposed to shoot me full of speed when I look at it? Momentum and stagnation? WHAT THE FUCK IS A “MALEVOLENTLY BAD” MAP, JASH?

But it’s the “values” columns that kind of give the game away, particularly the “forgotten values” bit. What values might those be? I just invoked David, who I’ve no doubt Jash would consider “good art”, what forgotten values from before 1500 does he hint at? But Jash isn’t really thinking in those terms, of course, he’s thinking in terms of the modern world, of which he is clearly not a fan, and of values he sees as lacking in that modern world. Values you might describe as… not entartet, perhaps?

Actually, no. That’s not a nice choice of word in this context. But I do think think Jash Dholani is… not that far from people who would use it unironically. There’s something kind of unpleasant about this list, and there’s something about him I really dislike. Somewhere down the track I can envisage him forming a little cult of like-minded drones, he strikes me somehow as the sort of person who’d do that…

RIP Jamie Reid

One of the iconographers of punk is gone. Apparently Reid literally suffered for his art, too; one day he was out walking while wearing a t-shirt with his “God Save the Queen” design on it and he got set upon by a gang who broke his leg. I don’t suppose many people connected to the Sex Pistols came away from them without at least some damage…

Franklin’s cathedral

This is something I found on Tumblr. The artist is Franklin Booth, apparently he specialised in absurdly detailed drawings of this sort (you can click on it to enlarge) because he saw the illustrations in magazines from when he was young and didn’t realise they were actually made from wood engravings, so he set out to recreate that sort of detail and texture with pen and ink.

From what I can find, this is an illustration for a story called “A Remembered Dream” written by one Henry van Dyke and published in 1917 in Scribner’s. I have not read this story, no idea what it’s about (apart from what the title perhaps indicates), and I’m just mesmerised by this image from it. What’s actually going on in it? Why is everyone fleeing the cathedral except this one person we see from the back? Is there a vague shape hidden in the texture of the background? Is the cathedral… leaning a bit? Did Satan appear to the people? Did God appear (which I would find more frightening)? When you don’t know what’s going on in the picture, it’s more alarming and suggestive than the actual explanation probably is…

Hexensieber

One of the great things I’ve found about Tumblr over the years is that there’s an awful lot of vintage SF/horror/fantasy book and magazine art on there, and not just the usual American stuff. I’ve got a ton of fumetti covers from there, plus whatever the Spanish French and German equivalents of fumetti are, which brings me to this:

I’ve seen this image on Tumblr a few times, but only recently have I seen it with such strident colours. It’s not quite as bold in this printed edition:

As seen here:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?603894

The picture itself is by Rudolf Sieber-Lonati, an Austrian artist who did tons of covers for magazines and pulp novels like this; you can sample his range at this site devoted to him (in German), which apparently also carries a few items misattributed to him according to his ISFDB entry…

As also seen here:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?781729

…but it also appears on this recent reprint of an even older Krimi from Bastei, and with the markedly stronger colours of the version at the top. I’m curious as to which is the “right” version now, is the more colourful version what Sieber-Lonati actually painted (and the colours got lost in the printing and/or that copy of the magazine has faded) or was it enhanced somehow for the reprinted issue (but why, if it was)? I don’t know. I like the bigger colours better, anyway…