John Coulthart's Blog, page 6

Sanquirico’s theatrical settings

Work-related research over the past couple of weeks has had me looking for pictures of theatres in the 19th century, especially backstage views. The latter proved harder to find than I expected although I did turn up a few useful reference images after scouring the picture libraries. Nuova raccolta di scene teatrali (1828) by Alessandro Sanquirico is an Italian book that surfaced during the searches, not something I wanted but it’s another collection of imaginary architectural views which I always like to see. Sanquirico was set designer for La Scala in Milan so most of these designs are for opera sets, although several are labelled “ballo“, a type of theatrical dance which evidently required dramatic settings. As to the designs, there’s more variety than you find among earlier generations of theatrical designers like the Bibienas, a family of artists who specialised in very detailed Baroque interiors. The Romantic era demanded tempestuous drama and greater spectacle, hence Sanquirico’s views of castles, caves, prisons, conflagrations and fanciful depictions of the ancient world. The selection that follows is only a small sample; the book has 242 plates in all.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fantasie di architettura by Aldo Avati
• The other Carceri
• Fantaisies Architecturales by Henri Mayeux
• Temples for Future Religions by François Garas

Weekend links 783

An illustration by William Heath Robinson for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1914).

• New music: How To Shoulder The Radiance Of Revelations by Dadub; Leviathan by Stephen Roddy; and Echoes Of The Hollow Earth by Cryo Chamber.

• At Sight & Sound: “Every time I look at the film, it gets better.” Stephen Soderbergh on Jaws.

• At Public Domain Review: The Language of Form: Lothar Schreyer’s Kreuzigung (1920).

Leafing through the merveilleux-scientifique novels today allows for a dual rediscovery: firstly, it uncovers the previously unrecognised richness of Belle Époque scientific fiction, which did not perish with the works of Verne. The stories take in journeys to Mars, solar cataclysms, reading of auras, psychic control, weighing of souls, death rays, alien invasions, even strolls among the infinitesimally small. But exploring the genre also offers insights into the cultural history of the era, marked by a significant permeability between science and pseudo-science. Reading this work, we can learn a lot about the aspirations, fears and beliefs of early 20th-century Europe.

Fleur Hopkins-Loféron on the evolution of French science fiction after Jules Verne

• Mix of the week: A Twin Peaks mix for The Wire by Lori Eschler & Dean Hurley.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Kefir.

• Patrick Wolf’s favourite albums.

• ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

• Frou-Frou Foxes In Midsummer Fires (1990) by Cocteau Twins | Midsummer Night (2010) by The Time And Space Machine | Midsummer Boulevard (2022) by Hawksmoor

Armand Rassenfosse’s Fleurs du Mal

It’s been a while since I found another illustrated edition of Baudelaire’s poems but there are still more of them out there. This surprises me a little considering the nature of Baudelaire’s writing, you can’t imagine Anglophone fin-de-siècle publishers lavishing such attention on poems which are morbid and erotic to this degree. Beresford Egan illustrated an edition of Les Fleurs du Mal but this was published in 1929 by which time Continental decadence was regarded in a more favourable light.

Armand Rassenfosse (1862–1934) was a Belgian artist whose 1899 edition of Baudelaire is what the French would call the artist’s chef d’oeuvre, a limited reprint of Les Fleurs du Mal illustrated with colour etchings on nearly every page. Rassenfosse’s approach is much more Symbolist in tone than the near pornography of Manuel Orazi, presenting a succession of idealised figures (naked women for the most part) in nebulous spaces. I was hoping he might have produced more in this style but his other work tends to be poster design and painted studies of female dancers in various states of undress.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Manuel Orazi’s Fleurs du Mal
• Pierre-Yves Trémois’s Fleurs du Mal
• Victor Delhez’s Fleurs du Mal
• Raphaël Drouart’s Fleurs du Mal
• Tony George-Roux’s Fleurs du Mal
• Percy Walter Wolff’s Die Vorhölle
• The art of Mario Laboccetta
• Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal

Parade de Satie

The first chimes of a period which began in 1912 and will only end with my death, were rung for me by Diaghilev, one night in the Place de la Concorde. We were going home, having had supper after the show. Nijinsky was sulking as usual. He was walking ahead of us. Diaghilev was scoffing at my absurdities. When I questioned him about his moderation (I was used to praise), he stopped, adjusted his eyeglass and said: ‘Astonish me.’ The idea of surprise, so enchanting in Apollinaire, had never occurred to me.

In 1917, the evening of the first performance of Parade, I did astonish him.

This very brave man listened, white as a sheet, to the fury of the house. He was frightened. He had reason to be. Picasso, Satie and I were unable to get back to the wings. The crowd recognized and threatened us. Without Apollinaire, his uniform and the bandage round his head, women armed with pins would have put out our eyes.

Jean Cocteau (again), writing in The Difficulty of Being about the opening night of Parade, the “ballet réaliste” he created for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Erik Satie wrote the music, Léonide Massine choreographed the dance, and Pablo Picasso designed the costumes and decor, with assistance from Giacomo Balla, one of the Italian Futurists. The reception for Parade wasn’t as thoroughly hostile as that received by Le Sacre du Printemps a few years earlier but there was bait enough for the reactionaries, with ragtime quotes in the dance and the music, and an everyday setting in which a group of street performers attempt to summon a crowd to see their show. Other details were overtly avant-garde: some of Picasso’s costumes were more like wearable cardboard sculptures, while Cocteau further antagonised the audience (and the composer) by adding the sounds of a typewriter, siren, pistol and steamship whistle to the music. The most significant response came from Apollinaire when he described the ballet in the programme notes as “une sorte de surréalisme“, giving the world a new word which we still use today.

Parade de Satie by Koji Yamamura is an animated presentation of Satie’s music which sees the characters from the ballet—a Chinese magician, a small American girl, the acrobats, a pantomime horse—jumping and dancing around the screen while Satie, Picasso and Cocteau observe the proceedings. It’s a lively and witty film, probably more lively than the ballet itself when the hand-drawn performers are less encumbered by gravity or their unwieldy outfits. Yamamura has directed a single animated feature, Dozens of Norths, and many more shorts like Parade de Satie, including films based on a story by Franz Kafka (A Country Doctor) and the life of Eadweard Muybridge (Muybridge’s Strings). Being a pioneer of motion photography and inventor of the Zoopraxiscope, Muybridge is an attractive subject for animators. The naked figures from his studies of human and animal motion turn up in Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations, while Gérald Frydman directed a short biographical film about Muybridge, Le Cheval de Fer, in 1984.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jean Cocteau: Autoportrait d’un inconnu
• Orphée posters
• Cocteau and Lovecraft
• Cocteau drawings
• Querelle de Brest
• Halsman and Cocteau
• La Belle et la Bête posters
• The writhing on the wall
• Le livre blanc by Jean Cocteau
• Cocteau’s sword
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• Cocteau at the Louvre des Antiquaires
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau

Weekend links 782

Ushiwakamaru and Benkei (2015) by Paul Binnie.

• “Gohatto depicts homosexuality within a very specific subset of society. Kubi explores further than that, depicting homosexuality between equals, and between bosses and subordinates. It tries to depict the relationship between power and authority, and how sexuality is used to maintain that authority.” Takeshi Kitano talking about Kubi, his film about sex among the samurai, which is receiving a belated release in the UK.

• “De Rome later said he’d never felt persecuted for his sexuality, and it’s this sense of the carefree that’s reflected in the lightness of his filmmaking.” Luke Turner on Peter De Rome’s homoerotic films which are currently being screened at the Barbican, London.

• At Public Domain Review: Helen Haiman Joseph’s A Book of Marionettes (1920), “The first comprehensive history of marionette artistry in the English language.”

• Mixes of the week: Isolatedmix 132: Psilocybin Therapy Protocol v1.22a by Matt Xavier, and DreamScenes – June 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At Sight and Sound: Backwards through the backwoods: music editors Dean Hurley and Lori Eschler on David Lynch and  Twin Peaks.

• Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2025 so far. Thanks again for the link here!

• New music: by Pan American & Kramer, and Modulations IV by Ian Boddy.

• At The Quietus: Peer Review: Peter Strickland interviews Cosey Fanni Tutti…and vice versa.

• Cosmic Dawn: A feature-length NASA documentary about the James Webb Space Telescope.

• RIP Sly Stone and Brian Wilson.

• Les Marionnettes (1991) by Zbigniew Preisner | Sword Of The Samurai (2006) by Lisa Gerrard | Seven Samurai (Ending Theme) (2012) by Ryuichi Sakamoto

Jean Cocteau: Autoportrait d’un inconnu

The title translates as “self-portrait of an unknown” although “unknown man” would be better English. The phrase is a curious one to apply to Jean Cocteau, an artist (or “poet”, to use his favourite epithet) who was known for his creative work from a very early age. Director Edgardo Cozarinsky uses Cocteau’s own narration from a collection of documentary films to chart the evolution of a polymathic public life, following the progress of Cocteau’s art from the poetry of his youth (which the older man deemed “absurd”), to his involvement with the Ballets Russes, his films and plays, and his later flourishing as a painter of murals like those in the Chapelle Saint-Pierre de Villefranche-sur-Mer.

In one of the later scenes Cocteau is shown talking to a wax figure of himself, describing the dummy as the one who goes out into the world to receive the plaudits and brickbats accorded to “Jean Cocteau” while the real Cocteau stays quietly at home in the south of France. The quotidian Cocteau would be the “unknown” in this respect; there’s no mention of his life with Jean Marais, for example, but I’m happy enough to spend an hour listening to him talking about his art. The reference to brickbats is a reminder that in France he was often reviled during his lifetime, regarded as a dilettante and a fraud. This was especially the case in André Breton’s Surrealist circle where those who wanted to avoid excommunication had to support the master’s lasting animus against the unknown poet.

A pair of Surrealist untouchables, 1953.

Given this, I was amused to see a brief shot of Cocteau signing a wall with the most notorious member of Breton’s long list of outcasts, Salvador Dalí. Cocteau was friends with Dalí in later years, and in one of the film clips mentions the painter introducing him to the concept of “phoenixology” or the revival of dead matter. Dalí had biological science and his own immortality in mind but for Cocteau the idea becomes a metaphor for the artistic process, something we see in Le Testament d’Orphée and La Villa Santa Sospir when he pieces together the petals of disassembled flowers.

I was watching a copy of Cozarinsky’s film which may be downloaded at Ubuweb. The narration is in French throughout but English subtitles are available here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Orphée posters
• Cocteau and Lovecraft
• Cocteau drawings
• Querelle de Brest
• Halsman and Cocteau
• La Belle et la Bête posters
• The writhing on the wall
• Le livre blanc by Jean Cocteau
• Cocteau’s sword
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• Cocteau at the Louvre des Antiquaires
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau

Orphée posters

Not a film poster. Orphée aux Yeux Perlés (1950) by Jean Cocteau.

After watching Jean Cocteau’s Orphée again this weekend I went looking for the film’s posters. There was more variety out there than I expected. Nothing as lavish as the posters for La Belle et la Bête but then you’d expect a fairy tale to be presented with more visual flair than Cocteau’s modernist myth. Most of the early examples are collaged arrangements of stills that give little idea of the film’s originality or dream-like qualities. I was hoping there might be some interesting Polish, Czech or Japanese designs but if there are they didn’t show up in my searches.

France, 1950.

France, 1950.

France, 1950.

Belgium, 1950.

Argentina, 1950.

Sweden, 1950.

Sweden, 1950.

Mexico, 1950.

Royal College of Art poster, circa 1961.

Germany, 1960s.

Britain, 1990s.

France, 2011.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cocteau and Lovecraft
• Cocteau drawings
• Querelle de Brest
• Halsman and Cocteau
• La Belle et la Bête posters
• The writhing on the wall
• Le livre blanc by Jean Cocteau
• Cocteau’s sword
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• Cocteau at the Louvre des Antiquaires
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau

Weekend links 781

Orphée aux Enfers (1896) by Jean Delville

• “Yes, there was a riot, but it was great”: Cabaret Voltaire on violent gigs, nuclear noise – and returning to mark 50 years.

• At Public Domain Review: Matthew Mullane on George Wightwick’s The Palace of Architecture (1840).

• New music: Dissever by Emptyset; Quiet Pieces by Abul Mogard; Analogues by Lawson & Merrill.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Artist Yukiko Suto finds beauty in Japanese residential neighbourhoods.

• At The Quietus: A Condition of the Space: Mary Anne Hobbs interviewed.

• At Baja el Signo de Libra: The homoerotic photography of Yves Paradis.

• Mix of the week: Bleep Mix #303 by Abul Mogard.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Stan Brakhage Day.

• RIP Edmund White.

• Brakhage (1997) by Stereolab | Brakhage (2002) by Robert Poss | Barbican Brakhage (2009) by John Foxx

Edward Wadsworth woodcuts

Englische Graphik (1923).

More art that caught my attention this week. Edward Wadsworth (1889–1949) is one of those artists with a single work that turns up regularly in social media, prompting a “Wow!” response before everyone moves onto something else. Dazzle Ships in Dry Dock at Liverpool (1919) is the Wadsworth that everyone likes, a painting that combines the artist’s persistent theme of ships and shipping with his experience as a member of the Vorticists, and a designer of “dazzle” camouflage for marine vessels. The dazzle fad didn’t last very long, and was of doubtful utility in any case, but it did give us many pictures of destroyers and batteships painted like floating masses of abstract art.

Platelayers’ Sheds (1914/1918).

Wadsworth’s prints, which include a few dazzle ships, are the kind of bold black-and-white art I always enjoy seeing, pictures that push their representations to the edge of abstraction. The woodcuts differ so much from his later paintings—quasi-Surrealist accumulations of tidal flotsam and other objects arranged against views of the seashore—they might be the work of a different artist altogether.

Liverpool Shipping (1918).

Dock Scene (c.1918).

Townscape (1920).

Tugs (1918).

Minesweepers in Port (1918).

SS Jerseymoor (1918).

Yorkshire (1920, dated 1921).

Newcastle (1913).

Blast Furnaces (1919).

Harbour of Flushing (1914).

Dazzle Ship in Dry Dock (1918).

Camouflaged Ship in D ry Dock (1918).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Félix Vallotton woodcuts

The art of Martin Monnickendam, 1874–1943

Gevel van de Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois.

Martin Monnickendam was a Dutch artist whose work caught my attention not for his paintings but for this series of etchings showing views of the streets and older buildings of Paris. The Rijksmuseum gives the series a date of 1896, when the artist was a mere 22 years of age but already working with a proficiency that makes me wish he’d done more in this style. Monnickendam’s subject and medium brings to mind Charles Méryon’s celebrated etchings of Paris but Méryon’s depictions of Notre-Dame and elsewhere generally place the buildings at a distance. Monnickendam fills his plates with closer views of architectural detail, showing how good the etching medium can be in capturing Gothic crenellations. All of which is of particular interest to me now that I’m working again on The Dunwich Horror. Lovecraft’s story doesn’t feature any specifically Gothic architecture but the detailed shading I’ve been doing is closer to etching than anything else.

Gezicht op de Saint-Gervais.

Impasse des Boeufs.

Marché des Carmes.

Notre-Dame van Moret-sur-Loing .

Notre-Dame van Parijs.

Passage Saint-Paul.

Place des Vosges.

Pont Neuf.

Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet.

Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.

Straatgezicht met het Hôtel de Sens.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Marville’s streets
• Atget’s corners
• Charles Méryon revisited