‘One of four costume cards and seven mica overlays.’ Paintings from Benares c. 1830, artist unknown, Watercolour on Card, currently in storage at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
These paintings are part of the V&A collection of East India Company paintings.
There isn’t much information on the V&A website about the purpose and significance of these images. I found the floating heads to be surreal but like much of the East India Company images they are probably part of a large-scale 19th-century project to record the occupations, religious types, locations, rulers, animals and plants of the Indian subcontinent.
There is something sinister in the floating heads which suggest unseen violence. Similarly, advertising and propaganda images of the empire edit out the horrific violence of empire and order colonial subjects.
Illustrations in Svartedauen (Black death) called: Pesta i trappen (Plague on the Stairs) & Musstad (Mouse town), by Theordor Kittelsen, 1896,
These prints imagine Norway in the year 1349 when the Black Plague killing 40-65% of the population in around 6 months. The plague arrived in Bergen, Norway on a ship chartered from England. Kittelsen’s book the Black Death depicts the plague as an hag travelling around, spreading disease and death.
Carel Weight, The Rendezvous, 1953, Oil on canvas, 860 x 1110 mm, Tate.
'Even when I paint a landscape out of doors, and I say I'm not going to put any figures in; when I get back to the studio I always paint in figures; it would be too lonely without people'. Carel Weight
I found it fascinating that Weight painted in the figures afterward. Whilst many of her pieces have very solid real figures caught in action there are others that have the translucent quality of ghosts (The Rendezvous, above and Pre-Raphelite Tragedy, below).
Carel Weight, Pre-Raphelite Tragedy, 1950, Oil on Board, 930 x 1530 mm, London, The Zwemmer Gallery.
Woodcut Prints from the Steppenwolf Portfolio by Helmut Ackermann, 1990. (Jazzbar, Goethe, The Meal & On a Rug Lay Two Naked Figures)
These beautiful woodcuts by Helmut Ackermann show scenes from the 1927 novel Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. The Steppenwolf is the hero Harry Haller, a man of the bourgeoisie living in the modern world but who finds himself outside of both.
These woodcuts are apt to describe a man caught between eras by working with the German expressionist style that revived early modern printmaking techniques in the early 20th century.
“The man of this concordat, like every other bourgeois ideal, is a compromise, a timid and artlessly sly experiment, with the aim of cheating both the angry primal Mother Nature and the troublesome Father Spirit of their pressing claims, and of living in a temperate zone between the two of them. This is why the average person tolerates what he calls ‘personality’, but, at the same time, surrenders the personality to the Moloch ‘State’ and constantly plays off one against the other. For this reason the bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.”
Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse, translated by Basil Creighton and Revised by Walter Sorell, 1927.
Currently reading Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. It took until page 80 or so for me to begin to understand and truly enjoy the book. But, once I did I found myself circling quotes (in pencil) on every page.
Eerie stills from the documentary series the Keepers. Specifically, these are from a recreation of a memory from Jane Doe. In the memory, she is taken to see the body of a murdered nun, Sister Cathy, whose death is the starting point for the documentary.
The black an white adds to the starkness and simplicity of the images. The first one, of electrical cable I found beautiful. I suppose in general the horror of the events described by these sequences focuses your eye, makes you very aware of the purposeful nature of these images.
To me, the emptiness and hardness of the school create a sense of an amoral environment. And the shining clean floor, sofa, and chair implies to me that appearances, especially of those in authority, can be deceiving.
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