G-A-Y Day(s)- Oscar Wilde- Salomé (1894)- PDF Format

Salomé may be the strangest thing Oscar Wilde wrote. It's definitely one of the strangest plays I've read and it's also one of my favourites.

The book this was scanned from didn't have the original Aubrey Beardsley illustrations, so I tracked them down and included them with the file.




From Robert Ross:

Salomé has made the author’s name a household word wherever the English language is not spoken. Few plays have such a peculiar history. Before tracing briefly the vicissitudes of a work that has been more execrated than even its author, I venture to repeat the corrections which I communicated to the Morning Post when the opera of Dr. Strauss was produced in a mutilated verson at Covent Garden in December, 1910. That such reiteration is necessary is illustrated by the circumstance that a musical critic in the Academy of December 17th, 1910, wrote of Wilde’s “imaginative verses” apropos of Salomé — a strange comment on the honesty of musical criticism. Salomé is in prose, not in verse.

Salomé was not written for Madame Sarah Bernhardt. It was not written with any idea of stage representation. Wilde did not write the play in English, nor afterwards re-write it in French, because he “could not get it acted in English” as stated by Mr. G. K. Chesterton on the authority, presumably, of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia or some other such source of that writer’s culture. It was not offered to any English manager. In no scene of Wilde’s play does Salomé dance round the head of the Baptist, as she is represented in music-hall turns. The name “John” does not occur either in the French or German text. Critics speak contemptuously of “Wilde’s libretto adapted for the opera.” Except for the performance at Covent Garden which was permitted only on conditions of mutilation, there has been no adaptation. Certain passages were omitted by Dr. Strauss because the play (which is in one act) would be too long without these cuts. Wilde’s actual words in Madame Hedwig Lachmann’s admirable translation are sung. The words have not been transfigured into ordinary operatic nonsense to suit the score. When the opera is given in French, however, the text used is not Wilde’s French original, but a French translation fitted to the score from the German.




Salomé was written by Oscar Wilde at Torquay in the winter of 1891–2. The initial idea of treating the subject came to him some time previously, after seeing in Paris a well-known series of Gustave Moreau’s pictures inspired by the same theme. A good deal has been made of his debt to Flaubert’s tale of Herodias. Apart from the Hebrew name of “Iokanaan” for the Baptist the debt is slight, when we consider what both writers owe to Scripture. On Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint Antoine Wilde has indeed drawn considerably for his Oriental motives ; not more, in justice it must be added, than another well-known dramatist drew on Plutarch, Bandello, and other predecessors. The simple syntax was, of course, imitated directly from Maeterlinck, who has returned the compliment by adapting to some extent other features from Salomé in his recent play Mary Magdalene, a point observed by the continental critics. Our old friend Ollendorff, too, is irresistibly recalled by reading Wilde’s French; as he is indeed by all of M. Maeterlinck’s early plays. A famous sentence in one of John Bright’s speeches Wilde bodily transferred when he makes Iokanaan say, “J’entends dans le palais le battement des ailes de l’ange de la mort.” Large portions of Holy Writ, too, are incorporated. One of the musical critics is particularly severe on some of the Biblical quotations from Ezekiel (spoken by Iokanaan). He finds them “typical of Wilde’s perverted imagination and tedious employment of metaphor.” To the more scholarly and truffle-nosed industry of Mr. C. L. Graves I am indebted for the discovery that Wilde probably got the idea of Salomé’s passion for Iokanaan from Heine’s Atta Troll, though it is Herodias, not her daughter, who evinces it. Before this discovery was announced in the Spectator, that too was merely a disgusting invention of Wilde, who is, of course, anathema to “the journal of blameless antecedents and growing infirmities,” as a well-known statesman said so wittily.

So much for the origins or plagiarisms of Salomé. It is well to remember also the many dramas and ballets composed by various French writers, including Massenet’s well-known opera Herodiade, composed in 1881, and performed in 1904 at Covent Garden with the title Salomé. All of these were taken directly from the story told by St. Mark or Flaubert ; nearly all of them are now forgotten. Wilde would certainly have seen one by Armand Sylvestre. Sudermann’s Johannes, from which Wilde is also accused of lifting, did not appear until 1898, several years later. Needless to say, there is no resemblance beyond that which must exist between any two plays in which John the Baptist and Herod are characters. Wilde’s confusion of Herod Antipas (Matt. xiv. 1) with Herod the Great (Matt. ii. 1) and Herod Agrippa the First (Acts xii. 23) is intentional. He follows a mediaeval convention of the mystery plays. There is no attempt at accurate historical reconstruction.




Madame Bernhardt, who in 1892 leased the Palace Theatre for a not very successful London season, had known Wilde from his earliest days. She has recorded her first meeting with him at Dover. He was constantly at the theatres where she was acting in London. She happened one day to say that she wished Wilde would write a play for her. One of his dramas had already appeared with success. He replied in jest that he had done so. Ignorant, or forgetful, of the English law prohibiting the introduction of Scriptural characters on the stage, she insisted on seeing the manuscript, decided on immediate production, and started rehearsals. On the usual application being made to the Censor for a licence it was refused. This is the only accurate information about the play ever vouchsafed in the Press when the subject of the opera is under discussion. Wilde immediately announced that he would change his nationality and become a Frenchman, a threat which in spired Mr. Bernard Partridge with a delightful caricature of the author as a conscript in the French Army (Punch, July 9th, 1892).

The following year, 1893, the text was passed for press, the late M. Marcel Schwob told me, by himself. He made only two corrections, he in formed me, because he was afraid of spoiling the individuality of Wilde’s manner and style by transmuting them into more academic forms and phrases. I have learned since, however, that Mr, Stuart Merrill, the well-known French–American writer, a great friend of Wilde, was also consulted, and that M. Adolph Rette and M. Pierre Louys (to whom the play is dedicated) claim to have made revisions. But no one who knew Oscar Wilde with any degree of intimacy would admit that Salomé, whatever its faults or merits or de rivations, owed anything considerable to the invention or talents of others. Emerson said that “no great men are original.” However this may be, Salomé is more characteristic and typical of Wilde’s imperfect genius, with the possible exception of The Importance of Being Earnest, than anything else he ever wrote. The sculptor must get his clay or bronze, his marble and his motives from somewhere, just as the painter his pigment and models. How much more does this apply to the dramatist? The play was published in French simultaneously by Messrs. Elkin Mathews and John Lane in London and by the Librairie de l’Art Independant in Paris in 1893. It was assailed by nearly the whole Press. But there was one exception : that of Mr. William Archer in Black and White. Now that Salomé has become part of the European dramatic repertoire, though so often consigned to oblivion by two generations of dramatic critics and though the fungoid musical critics have spawned all over it, Mr. Archer’s words have a special and peculiar interest :




“There is at least as much musical as pictorial quality in Salomé. It is by methods borrowed from music that Mr. Wilde, without sacrificing its suppleness, imparts to his prose the firm texture, so to speak, of verse. Borrowed from music may I conjecture through the mediation of Maeterlinck. . . . There is far more depth and body in Mr. Wilde’s work than in Maeterlinck’s. His characters are men and women, not filmy shapes of mist and moonshine. His properties are far more various and less conventional. His . . . palette is infinitely richer. Maeterlinck paints in washes of water-colour. Mr. Wilde attains to depth and brilliancy of oils. Salomé has all the qualities of a great historical picture, pedantry and conventionality excepted.” Black and White, March llth, 1893.

I do not know that Mr. Archer liked the play particularly or that he likes it now, but at all events he had the foresight and the knowledge to realise that here was no piece of trifling to be dismissed with contempt or assailed with obloquy. Mr. Archer has fortunately lived to see a good many of his judgments justified, and beyond emphasising his interesting anticipation of the eventual place Salomé was to occupy in musical composition, I need pay no further tribute to the brilliant perception of an honoured contemporary. The Times, while depreciating the drama, gave its author credit for a tour de force in being capable of writing a French play for Madame Bernhardt, and this drew from Wilde the following letter, which appeared in the Times on March 2nd, 1893:




“SIR, My attention has been drawn to a review of Salomé which was published in your columns last week. The opinions of English critics on a French work of mine have, of course, little, if any, interest for me. I write simply to ask you to allow me to correct a misstatement that appears in the review in question.

“The fact that the greatest tragic actress of any stage now living saw in my play such beauty that she was anxious to produce it, to take herself the part of the heroine, to lend to the entire poem the glamour of her personality and to my prose the music of her flute-like voice this was naturally, and always will be, a source of pride and pleasure to me, and I look forward with delight to seeing Mme. Bernhardt present my play in Paris, that vivid centre of art, where religious dramas are often performed. But my play was in no sense of the words written for this great actress. I have never written a play for any actor or actress, nor shall I ever do so. Such work is for the artisan in literature not for the artist.“I Remain, Sir, Your Obedient Servant,“OSCAR WILDE.”

The Censor was commended by all the other reviewers and dramatic critics. Never has that official been so popular.




In 1894 Messrs. Mathews and Lane issued an English translation of Salomé by Lord Alfred Douglas. The illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley which it contained were received with even greater disfavour by reviewers and art critics. A few of the latter, the late P. G. Hamerton and Mr. Joseph Pennell among others, realised, however, that a new artistic personality had asserted itself, and that the draughtsman was, if anything, hostile to the work he professed to embellish. Heir Miergraefe, the German critic, has fallen into the error of supposing that Beardsley’s designs were the typical pictorial expression of widespread admiration for Wilde’s writings. They are, of course, a mordant, though decorative, satire on the play. Excellent caricatures of Wilde may be seen in the frontispiece entitled “The Woman in the Moon” (Plate 1) and in “Enter Herodias” (Plate 9). The colophon is a real masterpiece and a witty criticism of the play as well. The impression the drawings have produced, not so much in England but in Europe, may be gauged by reference to the work of the same German critic, who in his universal survey of modern art allows only three artists of the English School separate chapters to themselves the three being William Morris, Whistler, and Beardsley.

By connoisseurs of Beardsley’s work the Salomé set of drawings is regarded as the highest achievement of a peculiar talent. In England, from constant reproductions and exhibition, they were more familiar to the public than the text of the play, until the revived interest in Wilde’s writings.

And here I may warn collectors against the numerous forgeries of the originals which are continually offered in the English and American markets. Of the sixteen drawings fourteen are still in the possession of Mr. John Lane. One (“Toilette,” Plate No. 12) is in the possession of the present writer, and “Enter Herodias” has recently passed from the collection of Mr. Herbert Pollit to that of Mr. W. D. Hutchinson. There is a coloured design of Salom6, one of Beardsley’s very few coloured drawings, belonging to Miss Doulton. This was never intended as an illustration for the play in published form, but on being shown to Mr. Lane suggested to him the idea of commissioning Beardsley to illustrate the English version of the play (Marillier, “Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley,” page 23). All others are spurious.




In 1896, when Wilde was still incarcerated at Reading, M. Lugne–Poe, the poet and actor, produced Salomé at the Theatre de l’OEuvre in Paris. It was coldly received. But the author, who heard of its production, refers pathetically to the incident in one of his letters to me from prison :

“Please say how gratified I am at the performance of my play, and have my thanks conveyed to Lugne–Poe. It is something that at a time of disgrace and shame I should still be regarded as an artist. I wish I could feel more pleasure, but I seem dead to all emotions except those of anguish and despair. However, please let Lugne–Poe know that I am sensible of the honour he has done me. He is a poet himself. Write to me in answer to this, and try and see what Lemattre, Bauer, and Sarcey said of Salomé”

Within two years of Wilde’s death, Salomé was first produced in Berlin on November 15th, 1902, at the Kleiner Theater, where it played for two-hundred nights, an unprecedented run for the Prussian capital. From that moment it became part of the repertoire of the German stage, and draws crowded, enthusiastic houses whenever it is revived. At Munich particular attention is given to the staging and mise-enscene. The late Professor Furtwangler was said to have personally supervised the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” which is rendered with scrupulous regard to archaic conventions. (In the opera the dance is except in the case of Madame Ackté seldom more than a commonplace ballet performance, and is usually executed by a super.) Technically the interlude of the dance interferes with the tense dramatic unity of the play (though this is less noticeable in the opera), and is one of many indications that Salomé was not originally composed for the stage.




In May, 1905, the New Stage Club gave two private performances (the first in this country) at the Bijou Theatre, Archer Street. A new generation of dramatic critics was more severe than its predecessor, but displayed less acquaintance with Scripture ; objection was again raised by one of them to certain phraseology, quoted from Holy Writ, “as the diseased language of decadence.” In June, 1906, the Literary Theatre Society gave further performances. This last production was distinguished by the exquisite mounting and dresses of Mr. Charles Ricketts. The role of Herod was marvellously rendered by Mr. Robert Farquharson ; that of Herodias by Miss Florence Farr. The National Sporting Club, Covent Garden, was the odd locality chosen for an illicit entertainment, on which the critics again fell with exacerbated violence. Another and very inadequate production occurred at the Court Theatre in February, 1911. Such is the remarkable history of a drama that shares the distinction or notoriety of Beckford’s Vathek, in being one of the only two considerable works written by an English author in French. Mr. Walter Ledger, the bibliographer, records, exclusive of the authorised French texts, over forty different translations and versions. These include German (seven), Czech, Dutch, Greek, Italian, Magyar, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Swedish, and Yiddish translations, in all of which languages it is performed. The play is often performed at the American Yiddish theatres. There is a popular Yiddish text sold for fivepence in London, where it is whispered that, unknown to the Censor, the play can also be seen in the Yiddish tongue. The authorised original French text is included in the uniform Methuen editions of Wilde’s works.




According to an interview with Dr. Strauss in December, 1905, when his opera was first produced in Dresden, the composer’s attention was first drawn to the possibilities of Salomé by a Viennese who had prepared a libretto based on Wilde’s work. This seemed to him unsatisfactory, and he turned to the original, or (to be precise) to Madame Lachmann’s German translation.A young French naval officer, Lieutenant Mariotte, a native of Lyons, unaware that a dis tinguished competitor was in the field before him, composed an opera round Salomé, for which he used the original French text. It was produced in 1911 in Paris, and ran concurrently with the work of Dr. Strauss. Mr. Henry Hadley, an American composer, has composed a symphonic poem “round Wilde’s motive. This was performed at Queen’s Hall in August, 1909. The burlesque dances of Miss Maud Allan and her rivals are also well known. It is noteworthy that the former appeared first at the Palace Theatre where, sixteen years earlier, the play was prohibited. It would be idle to deny that the origin of the dance was the extraordinary popularity of Wilde’s play on the Continent a popularity that existed at least four years before the production of Dr. Strauss’ s opera.

With reference to the charge of plagiarism brought against Salomé and its author, I venture to mention a personal recollection. Wilde complained to me one day that someone in a well-known novel had stolen an idea of his. I pleaded in defence of the culprit that Wilde himself was a fearless literary thief. “My dear Robbie’ he said, with his usual drawling emphasis, “when I see a monstrous tulip with four wonderful petals in someone else’s garden, I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals, but that is no reason why someone should grow a tulip with only three petals.” That was Oscar Wilde.




Technical Information:

Author: Oscar Wilde
Translator: Oscar Wilde/Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas
Title: Salomé
Year: 1894/1907

Format: PDF
Source: Scans of print book
File size: 3.38 MB
Number of Pages: 146


Contents:

The Persons of the Play
Introduction (From "Life of Oscar Wilde" by R.H. Sherard)
Salomé


Thanks to archive.org and the Library of Congress for the original upload!





Salomé Megaupload Link

Paul Cox- Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh (1987)- DVD9 (NTSC Format)

Here's a great companion piece documentary by Paul Cox of Van Gogh's inner life, in the artist's own words, by way of letters to his brother Theo. Voiceover by John Hurt, who makes Van Gogh's words come to life.




From Roger Ebert's blog:

I have been corresponding with a dear friend, the wise and gentle Australian director Paul Cox. Our subject sometimes turns to death. In 1988 he made a luminous documentary named "Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh." Today Paul wrote me that in his Arles days, van Gogh called himself "a simple worshiper of the external Buddha." Paul told me that in those days, Vincent wrote:

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why? I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age, would be to go there on foot.

Thank you, good Paul. I think that is a lovely thing to read, and a relief to find I will probably not have to go on foot. Or, as the little dog Milou says whenever Tintin proposes a journey, pas à pied, j'espère!




Technical Information:

Title: Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh
Year: 1987
Country: Australia
Director: Paul Cox

Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.07 GB
Length: 1:35:00
Programs used: DVD Decrypter, ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~4800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio: English- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 224 kb/s
Subtitles: None

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched

DVD Extras:
- Featurette: A Journey with Paul Cox
- Filmmaker biography
- Vincent van Gogh biography


Thanks to edgarb at Cinematik for the original upload!




(Use JDownloader to automate downloading)

Vincent Megaupload Links

Vincent van Gogh- The Complete Works (1853-1890)- High Res Images (JPG Format)

Van Gogh's complete works. Over 2,200 images in high res. FTD rocks.

Now, if only we can sort out our Francesca Woodman collection...




From Van Gogh Gallery:

On March 30, 1853 Anna Cornelia Carbentus gave birth to a boy in Groot-Zundert, Holland. Unbeknownst to her or the father, Reverend Theodorus van Gogh of the protestant church, this boy would be tormented by severe mental instability for the majority of his life, die from his own hands, and ultimately change the outlook on art for the rest of history. His life was to become one of uncertainty and madness, involving largely his own need to find a niche and the undeniable love for art. This man was Vincent van Gogh.

Vincent's family consisted of his three sisters Elisabeth, Anna, Wil, two brothers Theo and Cor, and his mother and father. His earliest years were spent as a quiet child with little or no attention spent on art or artistic qualities. Other specifics about Van Gogh's childhood are not known.

In 1870, after completing a sketchy array of education, Van Gogh was employed by the Hague gallery, run by French art dealers Goupil et Cie, at the age of 16. Later in 1873, Goupil transferred Vincent to London then again to Paris by 1875. After this relocation, Gogh lost all desire to become a professional art dealer; instead following in his father's foot steps and devoting his life to the evangelization of the poor seemed more logical. Despite his erratic behavior his parents agreed to pay for his education. Gogh soon abandoned his lessons and began a ministry with the miners of Borinage. During this time he was able to identify with the miners, their lifestyles, and their families. This interaction between Gogh and the worker class is later shown in his works as he becomes fascinated with depicting peasant life.




After working with the miners for a period of time, Vincent's own urge to leave something of importance behind for mankind along with his brother Theo's consistent pressure, he became an artist. Without any proper training, or even having open artistic talent, Gogh doubted his abilities, and was supported in this doubt by his parents. However, Theo continued to push Vincent forward and supported him financially. The outcome would be the creation of a master of art, who evolved from his doubtful shell into a brilliant but besieged mind very rapidly.

In 1881, at the age of 27, Vincent moved back in with his parents after completing nine months of further education in Brussels. At home Vincent set to work on teaching himself how to draw. He tested various different techniques and styles along with experimenting with different subject matters. Other areas he worked on mastering were perspective, shading, and anatomy. Many of his earliest pieces were of peasant life, which could be attributed to his work with the miners of Borinage. Vincent soon became passionate about becoming an acclaimed drawer of figures, and continued to practice his newly developed skills. By the end of 1881, Vincent had moved from his parent's house and was acquiring lessons from Anton Mauve, his cousin by way of marriage. Vincent also began a relationship with Sien Hoomik, a pregnant prostitute whom had had one child out of wedlock already. Vincent was deeply shunned by Mauve for this relationship thus causing the two to fall out of friendship. However, Vincent continued to master the skills of drawing and used Hoomik as a model whenever possible.




Vincent soon became irritable and made the choice to break off his relationship with Hoomik and move once again to follow artists like Van Rappard and Mauve to Drenthe. Vincent soon found a lack of inspiration and models and moved back in with his parents to continue practice. Here Vincent was first introduced to the paintings of Jean-Franqois Millet, a French artist, who had become quite famous across Europe for his renditions of peasant life. Van Gogh began painting and he forcibly modeled his style after Millet. By the age of 29, Vincent had moved from his parents' house and worked in a make-shift studio located in a room he rented from a Catholic church.

From the beginning of Van Gogh's artistic career he had the ambition to draw and paint figures, in 1884 he began working on mastering weathered hands, heads and other anatomical features of peasants. He was planning on creating a multiple figure piece that would make his name respected in the artistic community. The piece he created was entitled The Potato Eaters and was completed in 1885. This piece proved to be success, but not in his lifetime.

After the personal failure of The Potato Eaters, Vincent decided he needed some professional training in art techniques. He enrolled later that year in an academy in Antwerp where he discovered the art of Peter Paul Rubens, and various Japanese artists. Both of these factors would greatly affect Van Gogh's style in art. By early 1886, he had moved to Paris to live with his brother Theo. Here Vincent was immersed in a centrifuge of modern art from the impressionist and post impressionists. Van Gogh quickly dropped the dark colors he had used to create The Potato Eaters after discovering the palette to be horrendously out of date. He adopted the brighter more vibrant colors with ease and began experimenting with the techniques he saw in the art of the impressionist and post impressionists. He soon began to research the styles found in the Japanese artwork he had discovered a year earlier.




While in Paris, Vincent was acquainted with various other artists including: Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Emile Bernard. Vincent befriended Paul Gauguin and moved to Arles in 1888 hoping that his new friends would join him to create a school of art. Vincent was confident in his new and highly personal style and felt that he could attribute it to modern art with his outlandish new color combinations.

Later Paul Gauguin did join Van Gogh in Arles. Vincent began painting sunflowers to decorate Gauguin's bedroom. These sunflowers would later become one of Vincent's signature pieces. Although something much greater was brewing in Vincent's head, that he couldn't control.

Towards the end of 1888, the first signs of Van Gogh's mental illness began to take hold. He suffered from various types of epilepsy, psychotic attacks, and delusions. One such episode entailed Vincent pursuing Gauguin with a knife and threatening him intensely. Later that day, Vincent returned to their house and mutilated his ear, then offered it to a prostitute as a gift. Vincent was temporarily hospitalized and released to find Gauguin swiftly leaving Arles and his dream of an artistic community shattered.




As the year of 1888 came to an end, Vincent traveled to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence where he committed himself to an asylum. Here his paintings became a torrent of activity. Although he could not draw and paint for long periods of time without suffering from an attack, he managed to create The Starry Night which resides as his most popular work and one of the most influence pieces in history. The swirling lines of the sky are a possible representation of his mental state. This same shaken style is visible in all of his work during his time in the asylum.

Vincent left Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1890 and began contacting his brother Theo. van Gogh continued working and created a number of pieces; nearly one painting day. Vincent viewed his life as horribly wasted, personally failed and impossible. On July 27, 1890 Van Gogh attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest. He survived, but died two days later from the wound.

Theo, who had collected the majority of Vincent's work from Paris, died only six months later. His widow took the collection to Holland and dedicated herself to getting the now deceased Vincent the recognition he deserved. She published his work and Vincent became famous nearly instantly. His reputation has been growing since.





Vincent van Gogh Megaupload Links

Alphonse Maria Mucha- High Res Images (1896-1926)- JPG Format

Every once in a while, when there is nothing better on TV, we flip the channel to our local PBS for a rollicking episode of Rick Steves' Europe. Last night's episode was particularly fun. At least, it looked like Rick was having more fun than usual as he ran around Prague with an attractive female "tour guide" and a man we assume was his pot dealer, and drank more beer than Rick Steves should probably drink on the air. And between our concern for Rick's wife, who we doubt was a fan of the "tour guide," and our longing for some beer of our own, what really stood out from the art and architecture of Prague was the work of Alphonse Mucha. A little online research turned up this beautiful collection of almost 70 high resolution images at the Art Renewal Center, which I've compiled together into one easily-downloadable folder.




From Been Publishing, I'm Back:

Alphonse Mucha was born in 1860 in Ivancice, Moravia, which is near the city of Brno in the modern Czech Republic. It was a small town, and for all intents and purposes life was closer to the 18th than the 19th century. Though Mucha is supposed to have started drawing before he was walking, his early years were spent as a choirboy and amateur musician. It wasn't until he finished high school (needing two extra years to accomplish that onerous task) that he came to realize that living people were responsible for some of the art he admired in the local churches. That epiphany made him determined to become a painter, despite his father's efforts in securing him "respectable" employment as a clerk in the local court.

Like every aspiring artist of the day, Mucha ended up in Paris in 1887. He was a little older than many of his fellows, but he had come further in both distance and time. A chance encounter in Moravia had provided him with a patron who was willing to fund his studies. After two years in Munich and some time devoted to painting murals for his patron, he was sent off to Paris where he studied at the Academie Julian. After two years the supporting funds were discontinued and Alphonse Mucha was set adrift in a Paris that he would soon transform. At the time, however, he was a 27 year old with no money and no prospects - the proverbial starving artist




For five years he played the part to perfection. Living above a Cremerie that catered to art students, drawing illustrations for popular (ie. low-paying) magazines, getting deathly ill and living on lentils and borrowed money, Mucha met all the criteria. It was everything an artist's life was supposed to be. Some success, some failure. Friends abounded and art flourished. It was the height of Impressionism and the beginnings of the Symbolists and Decadents. He shared a studio with Gauguin for a bit after his first trip to the south seas. Mucha gave impromptu art lessons in the Cremerie and helped start a traditional artists ball, Bal des Quat'z Arts. All the while he was formulating his own theories and precepts of what he wanted his art to be.

On January 1, 1895, he presented his new style to the citizens of Paris. Called upon over the Christmas holidays to created a poster for Sarah Bernhardt's play, Gismonda, he put his precepts to the test. The poster, at left, was the declaration of his new art. Spurning the bright colors and the more squarish shape of the more popular poster artists, the near life-size design was a sensation.




Art Nouveau ("New Art" in French) can trace its beginnings to about this time. Based on precepts akin to William Morris' Arts and Crafts movement in England, the attempt was to eradicate the dividing line between art and audience. Everything could and should be art. Burne-Jones designed wallpaper, Hector Guimard designed metro stations, and Mucha designed champagne advertising (at right) and stage sets. Each country had its own name for the new approach and artists of incredible skill and vision flocked to the movement.

Overnight, Mucha's name became a household word and, though his name is often used synonymously with the new movement in art, he disavowed the connection. Like Sinatra, he merely did it "my way." His way was based on a strong composition, sensuous curves derived from nature, refined decorative elements and natural colors. The Art Nouveau precepts were used, too, but never at the expense of his vision. Bernhardt signed him to a six year contract to design her posters and sets and costumes for her plays. Mucha was an overnight success at the age of 34, after seven years of hard work in Paris.




Commissions poured in. By 1898, he had moved to a new studio, illustrated Ilsee, Princess de Tripoli (see image at left), had his first one-man show and had begun publishing graphics with Champenois, a new printer anxious to promote his work with postcards and panneaux - sets of four large images around a central theme (four seasons, four times of day, four flowers, etc. - see below for Stars). Most of these sets were created for the collector market and printed on silk.

There was a World's Fair in Paris in 1900 and Mucha designed the Bosnia-Hercegovina Pavilion. He partnered with goldsmith Georges Fouquet in the creation of jewelry based on his designs. The bronze, Nature (at right) is from this time period. He also published Documents Decoratifs and announced Figures Decoratives. Documents Decoratifs was his attempt to pass his artistic theories on to the next generation. In actuality, it provided a set of blueprints to Mucha's style and his imitators wasted no time in applying them.




His fame spread around the world and several trips to America and resulted in covers and illustrations in a variety of U.S. magazines. Portraiture was also commissioned from U.S. patrons. At the end of the decade he was prepared to begin what he considered his life's work.

Mucha was always a patriot of his Czech homeland and considered his success a triumph for the Czech people as much as for himself. In 1909 he was commissioned to paint a series of murals for the Lord Mayor's Hall in Prague. He also began to plan out "The Slav Epic" - a series of great paintings chronicling major events in the Slav nation. Financing was provided by Charles Crane, a Chicago millionaire. Mucha had hoped to complete the task in five or six years, but instead it embraced 18 years of his life. Twenty massive (about 24 x 30 feet) canvasses were created and presented to the city of Prague in 1928. Covering the history of the Slavic people from prehistory to the nineteenth century, they represented Mucha's hopes and dreams for his homeland. In 1919 the first eleven canvases were completed and exhibited in Prague, and America where they received a much warmer welcome.




History hasn't been kind to either Mucha or to the Czechs - as the current unrest in the area at the turn of this century shows. Mucha's bequest to his country was received with unkindly cold shoulders. The geopolitical world ten years after World War I was very different from the one in which Mucha had begun his project. Moravia was now a part of a new nation, Czechoslovakia (Mucha offered to help the new country by designing its postage stamps and bank notes). The art world was just as changed. And just as the proponents of "Modern Art" cast their slings and arrows at the oh-so 19th century style, varying political groups brought out their personal arsenals of vitriolic prejudice in damning one aspect or other of Mucha's work. The public seemed to appreciate them, but political agendas seldom give much weight to public opinion. Only recently have they been made available again. They are on permanent display in the castle at Morovsky Krumlov. Brian Yoder of the Art Renewal Center saw them when he visited the Czech Republic in 2001 (he says they are quite remarkable!). He says "the castle has certainly seen better days and the location is not ideal (for example it is unheated in the winter and is closed to the public during those months)." But at least the public, the appreciative and constant public, can view these masterpieces again.

The rest of Mucha's life was spent almost as an anachronism. His work was still beautiful and popular, it just was no longer "new" - a heinous crime in the eyes of the critics. When the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia, he was still influential enough to be one of the first people they arrested. He returned home after a Gestapo questioning session and died shortly thereafter on July 14, 1939.





Mucha High Res Images Megaupload Link

Suehiro Maruo- Ultra-Gash Inferno (2001)- JPG Format

I've been lagging on my Suehiro Maruo posts, so for the next few weeks there's a chance that FTD might be inundated with buckets of ero-guro. If you get splattered, I apologize in advance.




From Richard J. Hand at M/C Journal:

Given that the new advances in technology in the 1980s had a major impact on the carefully constructed myth of authenticity in horror and pornography, ranging from flawless special effects at one extreme to the idea of the handheld voyeur movie at the other, it is rather ironic that the key progenitor to the erotic-grotesque form is a long-established and in some ways basic form: the pen and paper art of manga. This medium can be traced back to pillow books and the illustrated tradition in Japanese culture – a culture where even written language has evolved from drawings rather than alphabetical ciphers. Technological innovation notwithstanding, the 1980s is an extraordinary period for manga and it is perhaps here that we find the most startling hybridisation of porn and horror where, to borrow a phrase from Liz Kotz, “pathology meets pleasure, where what we most fear is what we most desire”. Many of the most extreme examples of 1980s manga repeatedly confront the reader with tales that intersperse and interlink imagery and narrative sequences of sex, violence and the abject.




Suehiro Maruo is in many ways a commercially marginalised but highly renowned manga artist of the erotic-grotesque. His full-length manga novel Mr Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show (1984) is a sweeping tale of carnival freaks redolent with sex and sadism, but in this article I will address his short comic strips from around the same period. The stories collected in Suehiro Maruo’s Ultra-Gash Inferno (2001) present a mortifying vision of sex and horror with stories that draw on the erotically tinged world of classical Japanese theatre and the short fiction of Edogawa Rampo but push them into the domain of extreme pornography. In “Putrid Night” (1981), an abusive man, Todoroki, subjects his teenage wife, Sayoko, to vicious cunnilingus and anal sex. In one sequence, Sayoko gives oral sex while Todoroki runs a samurai sword across her cheek. In her misery, Sayoko finds true love in the teenage boy Michio. Their illicit sexual love is tender and fulfilling and yet the imagery that intersperses it is ominous: when they have sex in a field, their conjoined bodies are juxtaposed with rotting fruit infested with ants and Michio’s erect penis is juxtaposed with a serpent in the grass. Sayoko and Michio plot to murder Todoroki. The result is disastrous, with Todoroki cutting off the arms of his wife and her lover through the elbows, and lancing their eyeballs. In the carnage, Todoroki has sex with Sayoko. The young lovers do not die, and Todoroki keeps them alive in a cell as “pets” . In a grotesque triumph of true love, Todoroki, to his horror, spies on his two victims and sees them, their eye sockets and arm stumps pouring blood, tenderly making love.




In “Shit Soup” (1982), Maruo produces a comic strip with no story as such and is therefore a highly simplistic pornographic narrative. We witness a menage a trois with a young woman and her two male lovers and the comic presents their various exploits. In their opening bout, the woman squeezes a cow’s eyeball into her vagina and one man sucks it out of her while the other licks her beneath the eyelid. Later, the three excrete onto dinner plates and dine upon their mixed shit. The story ends with the three laughing deliriously as they fall from a cliff, an emblem of their joyful abandon and the intersection of love and death. As epilogue, Maruo describes the taste of excrement and invites us to taste our own. This ending is an ingenious narrative decision, as it turns on the reader and strives to deny us – the viewer/voyeur – any comfortable distance: we are invited, as it were, to eat shit literally and if we refuse, we can eat shit metaphorically. Suehiro Maruo’s work can also be subtle: in what looks like a realistic image at the opening of “A Season in Hell” (1981), a dead teenage girl lies, covered in “gore and faeces”, on a grassy path which resembles the hairy opening to female sexual organs. The surrounding field is like a pudenda and the double arch of the nearby bridge resembles breasts. Maruo can thus outwit the censorship tradition in which pubic hair is generally forbidden (it does appear in some of Maruo’s comic strips), although erections, ejaculations and hairless openings and organs would seem to be always graphically permissible.




Probably the most excessive vision in Ultra-Gash Inferno is “The Great Masturbator” (1982). In this, Suehiro Maruo presents a family in which the father repeatedly dresses his daughter up as a schoolgirl in order to rape her, even cutting a vagina-sized hole into her abdomen. Eventually, he slices her with numerous openings so that he can penetrate her with his fists as well as his penis. Meanwhile, her brother embarks on an incestuous relationship with his ancient aunt. After her death, he acquires her false teeth and uses them to masturbate. He ejaculates onto her grave, splitting his head open on the tombstone. The excess and debauchery make it a shocking tale, a kind of violent manga reworking of Robert Crumb’s cartoon “The family that lays together, stays together” from Snatch 2 (January 1969). Like Crumb, we could argue that Maruo employs explicit sexual imagery and an ethos of sexual taboo with the same purpose of transgressing and provoking the jargon of particular social norms.




The political dimension to Maruo’s work finds its most blatant treatment in “Planet of the Jap” (1985), anthologised in Comics Underground Japan (1996). This manga strip is a devastating historical-political work presented as a history lesson in which Japan won the Second World War, having dropped atomic bombs on Los Angeles and San Francisco. The comic is full of startling iconic imagery such as the Japanese flag being hoisted over the shell-pocked Statue of Liberty and the public execution of General MacArthur. Of course, this being Maruo, there is a pornographic sequence. In a lengthy and graphic episode, an American mother is raped by Japanese soldiers while her son is murdered. As these horrors are committed, the lyrics of a patriotic song about present-day Japan, written by the Ministry of Education, form the textual narrative. Although the story could be seen as a comment on the subjection of Japan at the end of the Second World War – a sustained ironic inversion of history – it seems more likely to be a condemnation of the phase of Japanese history when, tragically, a minority of “atavistic, chauvinistic, racist warmongers” secured for themselves a position of “ideological legitimacy and power”. However, Maruo is being deliberately provocative to his contemporary reader: he writes this story in the mid-1980s, the peak of Japan’s post-war prosperity. As Joy Hendry says, Japan’s “tremendous economic success” in this period is not just important for Japan but marks an “important element of world history”. Maruo ends “Planet of the Jap” with a haunting international message: “Don’t be fooled. Japan is by no means a defeated nation. Japan is still the strongest country in the world”.




The porn-horror creator Suehiro Maruo follows in the tradition of figures like Octave Mirbeau, Georges Bataille and Robert Crumb who have used explicit pornography and sexual taboo as a forum for political provocation. The sexual horror of Maruo’s erotic-grotesque manga may terrify some readers and titillate others. It may even terrify and titillate at the same time in a disturbing fusion which has social and political implications: all the Maruo works in this essay were produced in the early to mid-1980s, the peak of Japanese economic success. They also coincide with the boom years of the Japanese sex industry, which Akira Suei argues was terminated by the repressive legislation of the New Amusement Business Control and Improvement Act of 1985. Suei’s account of the period paints one of frivolity and inventiveness embodied in the phenomenon of “no-panties coffee shops” and the numerous sex clubs which offered extraordinary “role-playing opportunities”. The mood is one of triumph for the sexual expression of the customers but also for the extremely well-paid sex workers. Maruo’s stories contemporaneous with this have their own freedom of sexual expression, creating a vision where sexually explicit images comment upon a wide variety of subjects, from the family, scatological taboos, through to national history and Japan’s economic success. At the same time as presenting explicit sex as a feature in his films, Maruo always closely weaves it in with the taboo of death. Martin Heidegger interprets human existence as Sein-zum-Tode (being-towards-death): in Maruo’s vision, existence is evidently one of sexual-being-towards-death. Like Suehiro Maruo’s hideously maimed and blind lovers, humanity always returns to the impulse of its sexuality and the desire/will to orgasm: what Maruo calls “the cosmic gash” of physical love, a gash which also reveals, in a Heideggerian sense, the non-being that is the only certainty of existence. And we should remember that even when love is blind, someone will always be watching.





Ultra-Gash Inferno Megaupload Link

Hieronymous Bosch- The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1510)- High Res Images (JPG Format)

For all you Hieronymous Bosch groupies out in InterwebLand, here is a 7793 x 4409 pixel image of The Garden of Earthly Delights. (Yes, you heard me right. 7793 x 4409, bitches. L&S just said, "That's enormous...") You can study this coolest of cool paintings to your heart's content. But there's MORE! There are also 82 high resolution images of individual elements of the painting! And if you order now...

Wait. There's nothing to order. Dammit.


The Garden of Earthly Delights Megaupload Link

Kathy Drayton- Girl in a Mirror: A Portrait of Carol Jerrems (2005)- DVD Rip (XviD)

Iconic images that define a country have always fascinated me, and Vale Street, along with other photographs and self-portraits by Carol Jerrems perfectly capture an Australia of the 1970's long forgotten by time. You can practically hear Madder Lake playing in the background when viewing her work. And this excellent documentary chronicling the life and untimely death of the artist puts the viewer dead center into an Australian culture that was as vibrant as anything that was happening in either Europe or the States during the same period.

Included in this post is a short film featurette by Jerrems that was included in the DVD. We've also added it to the download. Enjoy.



From Peter Wilmoth at The Age:

It was when Carol Jerrems was making a film about a gang of 15-year-old sharpie boys from Heidelberg, most of whom had been expelled from school and, in their own words were involved in "bashing, beer, sheilas, gang bangs - which is rape - gang fights, billiards, stealing and hanging out" that she found out most clearly the cost of getting involved with her subjects.

"So far I have myself only narrowly escaped rape but was bashed over the head by the main actor while driving my car, which had just been dented by the rival gang with sticks. They steal my money and cigarettes when I'm not looking, but I refuse to be deterred."

Very little deterred Jerrems, even the game in which the sharpie boys drew straws to see who would "go off" with her. Her shy, earnest demeanor and angelic face framed by golden frizz belied a ferocious appetite for photographs that would capture the moment, a thirst for the next great shot that could - and sometimes did - endanger her life.

Friend Michael Edols recalls in a new film about her life that he and Jerrems went into a pub in Sydney's Redfern. "I remember watching Carol in the middle of this room and she turned her camera on this young man and photographed him." The man grabbed at Jerrems and tore off her necklace while Edols dragged her out of the pub and into the car. "On the way out," Edols says, "I got whacked in the chest and cracked two ribs. We had every window of the car totally smashed in, including the headlights."




"Carol was very shy and she didn't like being shy and she was always pushing against her inhibitions and her limits, and that often led her to dangerous situations," says Kathy Drayton, the director of Girl In A Mirror, about this extraordinary photographer's intense, short life. "There was a certain amount of naivety.

"Her photographs engage the viewer in an intimate relationship with her subjects. It's not always a friendly intimacy - sometimes her subjects look defensive, irritated or even menacing, but you always sense that you're seeing beyond the mask into the soul."

Jerrems was born in Melbourne in 1949, grew up in middle-class Ivanhoe and studied photography at Prahran College between 1967-70, where she was filmmaker and photography teacher Paul Cox's best student. "She stood out, she was odd," Cox says in the film. "She had this odd little smile."

Jerrems had found her calling early. In her second year at college, her confidence was such that she made up a stamp, "Carol Jerrems, Photographic Artist" which she would stamp on all her finished prints. "We were a bit scared of Carol," former Daddy Cool guitarist Ross Hannaford, who was also at Prahran, says in the film. "She was real serious. Carol was the first feminist I ever met. I remember she gave me a lift home once. I said 'Thanks, baby'. She said 'Come here. You don't call me baby.' Got a bit of a lecture."




Jerrems' success came quickly. In 1972, Rennie Ellis, the Melbourne photographer who died in 2003, opened Australia's first dedicated photographic gallery, Brummels, in South Yarra and selected the 23-year-old Jerrems' work as part of its first exhibition, a show called Erotica.

Always carrying a camera and flirting with the idea of danger, Jerrems wanted to capture the raw edges of the world she saw around her, subjects others weren't focusing on artistically: sharpie subculture, street life and urban indigenous people. "People were stereotyping indigenous people," said a friend, Ron Johnson. "I think Carol was showing 'This is not what it's all about, look, look at the expressions on people's faces - see what they're really feeling."

"People at the time were interested in traditional Aboriginal people while Carol was solely interested in urban Aboriginal people," says Kathy Drayton. "And at the time, sharpies were considered to be real bogans so it was unusual for someone of Carol's background to be interested in them."

Jerrems found work teaching photography at Heidelberg College, in the middle of a tough housing commission area. She was fascinated by the anti-social wildness of the boys, and spent time photographing them swimming in rivers, hanging around in backyards, wearing their skinned-rabbit jumpers, tight jeans and short curtains of fluffy dyed hair.

In this milieu, Jerrems found what Drayton calls the "brash sexuality of Australian youth in the '70s, a sexuality laced with vulnerability and darkness", and it inspired her most famous photograph. Vale Street 1975 is a mesmerising portrait of Melbourne model Catriona Brown flanked by two sharpie teenagers, the boys standing just behind in the shadows. The shot was taken at a house in Vale Street, St Kilda, at the end of a long day of shooting. Brown had asked Jerrems to take a shot for her folio, and Jerrems agreed, as long as she could shoot the boys with her, and use the shot for her folio.




The photograph is, says Drayton, regarded as a significant moment in Australian photography "as it bridges documentary realism and the more subjective style of photography that marks the post-modern era". The power of the photograph was the human connection. "Jerrems does not presume that she is outside the event without influence on it," wrote Helen Ennis, former curator of photography at the National Gallery of Australia.

Jerrems' development as a portrait photographer coincided with rising interest in photography as an art form in Australia. Photographers were beginning to be deeply involved with their subjects rather than discreet observers shooting at a distance. Jerrems saw the traditional documentary style of photography as exploitative and believed the more personal collaborations between photographer and subject to be more honest, even if they were more risky personally.

Paul Cox once wrote: "She had to experience everything and feel things deeply before she could record them. She lived to the fullest, then withdrew into her own world."

Part of the power of Jerrems' work stems from its reflection of a certain pocket of life in the mid to late 1970s, the world of filmmakers, photographers and other creative types living in group houses. The sexual freedom and youthful confidence of the time, as enunciated and encapsulated by Skyhooks' Living In The Seventies album, is everywhere in her work. Drayton says Jerrems was "adventurous and forthright in her sexuality", having affairs with many of her friends, men and women, reflected in her work, "at times seductive, at others, frankly post-coital".




In the film, one of her great loves, the filmmaker Esben Storm, remembers Jerrems arriving in Sydney with new photographs. "Inevitably they'd be photographs of her waking up . . . with someone. While I'd been off sort of having wild times, she'd be having her wild times. She would sleep with someone and that would mean there would be an intimacy that would allow her to take photographs.

"It was the time of free love in a way, even though we weren't that free. There were ideals that it was uncool to be jealous and that you weren't possessive. We all tried to live by that, even though we couldn't really."

Greg Macainsh, Skyhooks' songwriter, remembers Jerrems photographing the band for a book called Million Dollar Riff. "She came to a number of gigs," he says now. "She was very quiet, reserved. She would make herself virtually invisible. I remember her in the dressing room being very still in the corner. She didn't take a lot of shots, she would wait for the right moment. She wasn't a motor-drive type, she was a bit like a sniper, waiting for the perfect opportunity."

Ross Hannaford was close to Jerrems for a while at Prahran College and remembers the seriousness with which she pursued her photography. "It was a time when there was incredible optimism in the air," he says now. "If you had a dream, you could do it. There didn't seem to be anything holding people back. I'd watch Carol shooting and I didn't realise what she was up to. 'What are you taking all that rubbish for?' But when you look back it seemed to encapsulate the times and the life around you. Her work took on a significance later on."

But amid the gaiety and youthful charge in Jerrems' pictures, Helen Ennis says a distinct change in mood is evident in the work. "The early photos between 1972 and 1975 were all about optimism. There's a huge amount of energy in them. It was all bound up with the excitement about the Whitlam government and this desire for change. But from 1976 I don't think they were anywhere near as optimistic."




Darkness

It wasn't just the Whitlam dream fading that gave Jerrems' work this darkness, nor the mood captured in the Skyhooks song Whatever Happened To The Revolution? ("We all got stoned and it drifted away"). While there is great exuberance in the decade the film documents, there is also a profound sadness about Jerrems' life. The odd little smile that Paul Cox talks about is rarely seen in the several self-portraits that feature in the film. Instead, there are many hints of the depression that she struggled with. Her friend Robert Ashton, who lived with Jerrems in a group house, remembers her bedroom door being closed for hours and even days.

In 1979, Jerrems went to Hobart to teach. Shortly after arriving she was diagnosed with polycythemia, a rare blood-related cancer. She underwent months of invasive and painful procedures, but came to a realisation she was dying. Jerrems photographed and wrote about her physical decline. She photographed doctors hovering, the scars on her stomach, and her mother, with whom she had a difficult relationship, visiting. As the camera pauses on a shot of her mother, an actress reads from Jerrems' journal: "She is one of the few people with the ability to push me over the edge into tears or screaming."

Carol Jerrems died in Melbourne in February 1980, three weeks before her 31st birthday. Her work was bequeathed by her mother to the National Gallery of Australia. In 1990 a retrospective was staged, but until now Jerrems has remained unknown outside photographic and film circles.

Girl In A Mirror gives an insight into the counterculture of the 1970s - the music, the cars, the fashions, the social tensions, the sexual experimentation. Kathy Drayton, with help from the National Gallery of Australia, had access to hundreds of Jerrems' photos as well as shots from Rennie Ellis (who photographed Jerrems often), friend Robert Ashton and Henry Talbot. The journals Jerrems kept after 1975 are used to "narrate" the film.

Drayton, who has worked as an editor with SBS television as well as editing a variety of independent experimental films and short dramas, says her interest in Jerrems was piqued when she saw three of her photographs at a New South Wales Art Gallery exhibition. The "deceptively simple power and beauty" of the three photos haunted her, and she began to research Jerrems.

"There's an emotional intensity and intimacy with Carol's photographs," she says.

Who was Carol Jerrems? "There were a huge number of perspectives from people about Carol," says Drayton. "She went into roles with people, played games. She became whatever people wanted her to become."




Technical Information:

Title: Girl in a Mirror: a Portrait of Carol Jerrems
Year: 2005
Country: Australia
Director: Kathy Drayton

Source: DVD Retail
Video Codec: XviD
Container: .mp4
Size: 568 MB
Length: 0:55:31
Programs used: Unknown

Resolution: 640x368
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG4 @ ~2500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps

Audio: English- AAC Stereo @ 127 kb/s
Subtitles: None

Bonus: Hanging About (a short film by Carol Jerrems)





Girl in a Mirror Megaupload Link

Waldemar Janusczak- Picasso: The Full Story (2002)- DVD Rip (XviD)

In the next few weeks we're going to do our damndest to fill out the documentary section, which will give you folks some rest from the 7 gig downloads that we normally post.

Here's an excellent Picasso documentary for your approval. What makes this documentary stand out from other Picasso docs is that it's from the viewpoint of Picasso's close friends and family, which gives personal insight into the artist, and explores the magical and human aspects of this artistic genius. This is a must-see. Enjoy!




From DVD Times:

Part 1: Magic
Magic traces Picasso’s early influences back to his birth in Malaga in 1881 and early childhood in Barcelona, attempting to relate his artistic power with the influence of Southern Spanish Andalusian gypsy lore, comparing the “search for the sacred fire” in his painting with voodoo and shamanism, where women are seen as sacrificial offerings made for his art. This is intriguing and Richardson makes a good case, examining numerous works and tying this into the well-known influence of the powerful symbolism of tribal and prehistoric art on Picasso’s later work. There is undoubted power in Picasso’s work and it is worth examining what the secret of that force is, but calling it ‘magic’ feels somewhat sensationalist and is far from convincing. What the first part manages to do successfully however is draw a clear line between Picasso’s life and the various early periods of his artwork, making a good connection between the duality of sex and death in Picasso’s work up to 1916; the death of his friend Cassagenes in Paris in 1900 as the inspiration for his Blue Period; his affair with model “La Belle Fernande”, their visits to Gosol and the beginning of his Rose Period; and the development of cubism with Braque. Particular attention is given to his ground-breaking work on “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, examining the influences of tribal art, early Iberian art and El Greco on this key work.




Part 2: Sex
Sex focuses on the numerous women in Picasso’s life (although they weren’t exactly scarce in the first part). Again, this episode is very well constructed and thematically strong, full of intriguing links between Picasso’s life and loves and the powerful influence the various women had on his work. This part looks at Picasso’s work with Jean Cocteau on a cubist ballet, his marriage to ballet dancer Olga Koklova, their visit to Pompeii and its influence on his fascinating Neo-Classical Period, leading to the brief refinement of his Duchess Period. It’s not easy to keep up with the numerous affairs he conducted while married to Olga, but Marie-Therese Walther and Dora Maar are singled out for particular attention, the programme examining the various depictions of women and sex in Picasso’s work, finding them not erotic or salacious, but deeply powerful, matching the tone of the content to the intensity and the secrecy of those relationships. It briefly tackles more recent charges of misogyny, but quickly dismisses them as being culturally endemic in Picasso’s Andalusian make-up, seeing women in the dual aspect of Madonna and whore. This part ends with a fascinating new look at the masterpiece “Guernica”, interpreting it as the war in Picasso’s own life between his various mistresses, which is something I hadn’t heard before and it makes the case very well.




Part 3: Death
Death charts the final stage in Picasso’s life from the war years in Paris through to his time in Antibes, his later involvement with the Communist Party, the Peace Movement and the years leading up to his death in 1973 at the age of 91. This is the period the presenter Richardson is most familiar with as it was the time he came to know Picasso, but there is surprisingly little personal reminiscence. The episode nevertheless covers well Picasso’s work and his relationship with the women in his life. These later years are marked with a struggle to remain vigorous and active against the encroaching spectre of death by keeping plenty of younger women around. Francoise Gilot, his lover and 40 years his junior at the time, contributes to this section with comments on the work he created in his later years, on the paintings that show the joy of life and the ceramics in which she is immortalised. His final works, revisiting and reworking the old masters, is also examined, along with his final years with Jacqueline Roque.




Technical Information:

Title: Picasso: The Full Story
Year: 2002
Country: U.K.
Director: Waldemar Janusczak

Source: DVD Retail
Video Codec: XviD
Container: .AVI

Size:
Part1- 1.09 GB
Part2- 746 MB
Part3- 746 MB

Length:
Part1- 01:16:53
Part2- 00:49:09
Part3- 00:49:50

Programs used: Not Available

Resolution: 672x368
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG 4
Frame Rate: 25 fps

Audio: English- AC3 Stereo @ 224 kb/s
Subtitles: None





Picasso: The Full Story Megaupload Links