August 21, 2015 Look Beardsley’s Poe By Dan Piepenbring Illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, made to accompany Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. Beardsley, born on August 21, 1872, favored the grotesque and the erotic in his drawings and had a large influence on the developing the Art Nouveau style, though he lived only to twenty-five. He also illustrated work by Oscar Wilde and Alexander Pope and helped found The Yellow Book. From “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Read More
August 17, 2015 Look Vengeance, Death, Blood, and Revenge By Dan Piepenbring Act I, scene i Titus Andronicus is a hideous play. Harold Bloom called it “a poetic atrocity”; Samuel Johnson refused to believe that Shakespeare was its author, writing that “the barbarity of the spectacles, and the general massacre, which are here exhibited, can scarcely be conceived tolerable to any audience … That Shakespeare wrote any part, though Theobald declares it incontestable, I see no reason for believing.” In its five grisly acts, fourteen people die; at least one is raped; throats are cut; hands, tongues, and heads are cut off; blood spurts “as from a conduit with three issuing spouts”; bodies are thrown to beasts and into pits, dragged into forests, buried alive chest-deep and left to starve; the bones of two men are ground “to powder small” and baked, with heads, into pies, which are then fed to their mother. In other words, it’s one of those tragedies that was just crying out for an illustrated edition. Read More
August 11, 2015 Look The Joys of Polychrome Xylography By Dan Piepenbring All images via Cambridge University Library Among the selections recently added to Cambridge’s Digital Library is Shi zhu zhai shu hua pu, or Manual of Calligraphy and Painting, a seventeenth-century Chinese book by the Ten Bamboo Studio, based in Nanjing. First published in 1633, it’s believed to be the earliest surviving example of multicolor printing—specifically, of a woodcut technique known as douban in which inks of varying colors are applied in succession, giving the finished print the look of a hand-painted watercolor. The book’s butterfly binding—an early Chinese process in which the pages are printed on only one side, and then pasted together and folded—made it so fragile that the university forbade anyone to open it until it had been digitized. It comprises eight sections: birds, plums, orchids, bamboos, fruit, stones, ink drawings, and (that perennial favorite) miscellany. You can see some of the woodcuts below, and read more about the book at Hyperallergic. Read More
August 6, 2015 Look Panther and Lilies By Dan Piepenbring Lajos Vajda, Panther and Lilies, 1930-33, photocollage on paper, 25.5″ x 20″ The Hungarian artist Lajos Vajda died in 1941, when he was only thirty-three—having long suffered from tuberculosis, he’d fallen ill during a compulsory stint in the Labour Service, the government’s antisemitic substitute for military conscription. Vajda’s paintings had garnered him a reputation among the avant-garde from a young age: an early critic called them “modern catacomb art.” As a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, one of his exhibitions met with such disdain among the conservative faculty that he was expelled. By the end of the twenties, he’d allied himself with the Munka Kör, a revolutionary group of artists, intellectuals, and workers. Vajda spent the early thirties moving from hostel to hostel in Paris, where he developed a fascination with film that led to a prolific period as a collagist. You can see a number of his photomontages from this time below—like his paintings and works in charcoal, they exude a fear of fascism and prefigure the violence of the Second World War. Ironically enough, a posthumous show of his work in 1943 at the Budapest Alkotás House of Art had to be evacuated. It was interrupted by an air raid. Read More
August 5, 2015 Look Teenage Dream By Dan Piepenbring Four paintings from Grace Weaver’s “Teenage Dream,” showing for two more days at Thierry Goldberg Gallery. Weaver takes the title of her show from Katy Perry’s (not undeservedly) ubiquitous 2010 single. She imagines her paintings as pop songs. See more of her work on her Web site. Match Point, 2015, oil on linen, 72″ x 72″. Read More
July 30, 2015 Look Five Photographs by Ellen Auerbach By Dan Piepenbring From “Ellen Auerbach: Classic Works and Collaborations,” an exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery through August 14. Auerbach, who died in 2004, worked in Berlin in the time of the Weimar Republic; she’s remembered for her work with ringl + pit, an advertising studio she started with her friend Grete Stern. The pair found recognition for their photography in what was then a field dominated by men; their pictures vacillated between genres, using surrealism and montage to blur the line between commercialism and fine art. ringl + pit, Petrole Hahn, 1931, silver print mounted to board, 9.25″ x 11″. Read More