Dali House

I was admiring this painting Deang Buasan of Thailand and realised I liked it so much because it reminds me of Edmund Dulac’s illustrations.

Deang and his disparately minded fellow artists Thaweesak Srithongdee and Chakkrit Chimnok had a show in Bangkok recently that had been previewed last year at the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in Japan. If you look up “FT3D” on the Web you might find more.

Deang’s brother drowned when they were children, so there’s always a water element in his paintings, as well as evident grief. In Fukuoka he showed a painting of himself as a child gazing at a lifeless dummy on the floor, seedpods strung between them as if they were both drifting in water.

“Lotus under the Moonlight” – designed, like all of his two-dimensional work, from a 3D model – does wonderful things with reflections and angles, illusion and visual effects in every corner, including beneath the water’s surface.

Compare it to Dulac’s illustration here for “The Voyage of the Basset”, written by James C Christensen with Renwick St James and Alan Dean Foster. This wasn’t anywhere near the best work by Dulac but, as we’ll see when we get to sizing up different people’s water nymphs, he was a marine genius.

Edmund was born Edmond in Toulouse, France, in 1882 and raised for the bar, but instead of going into law, he raised the bar in illustrating books, and “Golden Age” children’s books in particular.

When I was a kid we had a massive edition of “The Snow Queen and Other Stories from Hans Andersen”, which had originally come out in 1911, and as I grew older Dulac’s pictures (this one from “The Nightingale”) scared the hell out of me, then fascinated me, then charmed me, then … well, some of the mermaids are kinda hot.

Dulac chucked law school in favour of the Ecole des Beaux Arts and started collecting prizes for his watercolours, then in 1904 – freshly divorced from an American woman 13 years his senior – shipped off to London.

A year later, in “Rip Van Winkle”, Arthur Rackham became the first to use a new process, now called colour separation, to mass-produce his illustrations. It was a huge success, Rackham ingeniously capturing the quirks of Washington Irving’s characters (see the story and pictures here), and the colours were beautifully faithful to his original paintings thanks to being printed on sheets of specially coated paper that had to be “tipped-in” to the book rather than bound in with the rest of the pages.

These pages were forever falling out of our Hans Andersen book and threatening to migrate with the wind that was so vigorously illustrated on many of them. Below is another memorable image from that tome, illustrating “The Garden of Paradise”.

The new process also meant that the illustrations didn’t require heavy ink lines to hold the coloured washes in place – the lines covered up ovelaps in the colours – and Dulac’s work was perfectly suited to it. He was hired to do 60 illustrations for “Jane Eyre” and other works by the Bronte sisters, and was soon contributing to Pall Mall magazine alongside Rackham, to whom he would forever more be compared. They both have their argumentative devotees.

Rackham’s “Rip” and equally popular “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens” a year later were published by Hodder & Stoughton, and when Rackham jumped to another house, Hodder jumped on Dulac to illustrate “The Arabian Nights”.

In an arrangement that would remain in place for years, the paintings were commissioned by the Leicester Gallery, Hodder got the reproduction rights and put out the book, and then the gallery sold Dulac’s paintings. Shown here, “The Princess and the Pea”. There was something new every year, perfect for collectors: “Shakespeare’s The Tempest”, “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”, “The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tale”, “The Bells and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe” …

In 1913, two years after remarrying (Elsa Arnalice Bignardi, who was shy despite being Italian-German, and evidently not much fun intellectually, so Edmund would later complain), Dulac discovered the Far East, about the same time as our post-impressionist friends, and showed it off to the rest of the West with “Sinbad the Sailor and Other Stories from the Arabian Nights” the following year.

During the Great War he did a lot of fund-raising with illustrations for “King Albert’s Book”, “Princess Mary’s Gift Book” and “Edmund Dulac’s Picture Book” for the French Red Cross, but by the time his “Tanglewood Tales” came out just after the armistice, nobody was much interested in these sort of gift books anymore. New techniques in printing had enabled photography to take hold, and rather than his illustrations, it was Dulac, all of 35, who was in a bind.

Portraits and his caricatures for the weekly newspaper The Outlook paid the bills, but only just. He illustrated the 1920 history “The Kingdom of the Pearl” and got into product design (he was the master of postage stamps for a while) and, for his friends WB Yeats and Sir Thomas Beecham he did theatre design.

In 1923 Dulac and Elsa separated and soon after his friend Helen de Vere Beauclerk moved in with him. She stayed with him for the rest of his life. Third time lucky.

This is one of three illustrations in this post from “The Snow Queen and Other Stories from Hans Andersen”.

Yeats dedicated his 1933 poem “The Winding Stair” to Dulac, and four years later Dulac returned the favour by composing the music that accompanied readings of Yeats’ pieces on BBC radio.

Unfortunately it was a mess and the two had a row, but it was resolved, and after World War II, when Yeats’ body was moved from France home to Ireland, Dulac designed a memorial for the poet’s former grave in Roquebrune.

Through the ’40s he did loads of drawings for Hearst’s American Weekly. He also managed to remain the busiest of book illustrators, when the jobs appeared. He did “Treasure Island”, “The Golden Cockerel” and was working on “Comus” when a third heart attack killed him on May 25, 1953, at the age of 70. It was published posthumously.

I was talking about mermaids, and look what’s there was when Dulac wasn’t around to help.

Two by Rackham:

Below left, John William Waterhouse’s “A Mermaid” from 1900, and on the right, an artist best left unidentified but, you know, typical.

Edmund Dulac, who possibly belonged underwater.

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There was a big rumble this month over an expected disruption of MTV thanks to a sunspot that went by the name of 930, but I noticed not a jot of difference. In fact it’s been absurdly cold in Bangkok these last few days, somewhere around 28 Celsius with the wind-chill factor.

Wind chill? Tracking down what became of Sunspot 930, I stumbled into SpaceWeather.com (motto: “Where would you be without us?”), where, after a moment’s embarrassed silence, they informed me that the solar wind speed was currently 630.6 kilometres per second, and that Earth is currently inside a solar wind stream flowing from one particular hole in the sun’s corona.

So no wonder it’s cold. See the rest.

All that meat in the last post got me thinking about artists of another order who turn carcasses into wall-mountable decoration. But I’m warning anyone who might share my curiosity about taxidermy that, unless you’re willing to shell out a bundle for some very genre-specific apparatus, it’s a closed shop.

And don’t ever mention Tony Perkins in “Psycho”. Taxidermists are a touchy bunch. I’m guessing they all wanted to be surgeons at some point and this is as far as life let them get with a knife. See the rest.

Reading about Chaim Soutine going to a slaughterhouse and dragging a side of beef back to his studio at La Ruche in Paris so he could spent several odorific days painting its pageant of festering colours made me hungry for more, so I called up Rembrandt to order a whole “Slaughtered Ox” and he recommended a few other butchers with brushes.

If you missed the reasoning behind Russian expressionist Soutine’s blood-soaked creativity, so did I, but the basic story is here. Pictured is the result, “Carcass of Beef”, which fetched a fatty £7.8 million at auction earlier this year.

Since then meat’s been mostly a matter of angry art. Gabriela Rivera, at the top of this post and the top of her form, chilled a gallery in Chile a few years ago with her “Silence of the Lambs” impressions.

“My work is a metaphor for the relationship that people have with themselves every day when they look in the mirror,” she said from a cloud of appreciative flies, which couldn’t help also noticing her videos of women urinating in the street and smashing boiled eggs with their hands. See the rest.

Click the image to see it much larger.

Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) isn’t the kind of painter who would normally grab my attention – too bucolic and lah-di-da for my taste – but intriguing things do keep popping up in his work, not least the claim that “The Shepherds of Arcadia” answers the riddle of the Holy Grail.

Like millions of others, I came across this ultimately enervating contention in “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail”. Co-author Henry Lincoln followed that up with “The Holy Place”, which I think Ron Howard and Tom Hanks are going to make into a movie. Poussin was rumoured to be a Grand Master of the Knights Templar. Even the word “rumour” doesn’t have as much weight as it used to, does it?

Now I’ve found out (probably after millions of others) that Poussin’s “Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake” has quite a story behind it too. The title’s pretty darned good on its own.

And the original title was “The Effects of Fear”, which is even better. See the rest.