Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Monday, March 4, 2013

Frans de Geetere & Arthur Rimbaud... The Stupra... 1925




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Frans de Geetere ~ illustration for The Stupra 1925


The ancient beasts...


The ancient beasts bred even on the run,
Theirs glans encrusted with blood and excrement. 
Our forfathers displayed theirs members proudly
By the fold of the sheath and the grain of the scrotum.

In the middle ages, for a female, angel or sow,
A fellow whose gear was substantial was needed;
Even a Kléber, judging by his breeches which exagerate
Perhaps a little, can't have lacked resources.

Besides, man is equal to the proudest mammal;
We are wrong to be surprised at the hugeness of their members;
But a sterile hour has struck: the gelding

And the ox have bridled their ardours, and no one
Will dare again to raise his genital pride
In the copses teeming with comical children.

Arthur Rimbaud ~ The Stupra 1925



Thursday, November 29, 2012

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Willy Pogany... illustrations from The Song Celestial 1934




from The Song Celestial (Bhagavad Gita) by Sir Edwin Arnold 
illustrated by Willy Pogany



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Dwelling outside the stress
Of passion, fear, and anger; fixed in calms
Of lofty contemplation;



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 The Doors of Hell
Are threefold, whereby men to ruin pass, --
The door of Lust, the door of Wrath, the door 
Of Averice.

" The elements, the conscious life, the mind,
The unseen vital force, the nine strange gates
Of the body, and the five domains of sense;
Desire, dislike, pleasure and pain, and thought
Deep-woven, and persistency of being;
These all are wrought on Matter by the Soul! "

 Chapter 13

previous POGANY


Thursday, September 13, 2012

Enrico Baj ... illustration from The Book of Imaginary Beings by J L Borges 1973



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"Let us move now from the zoo of reality to the zoo of mythology, that zoological garden
whose fauna is comprised not of lions but of sphinxes and gryphons and centaurs.
The population of this second zoo should by all rights exceed that of the first,
since a monster is nothing but a combination of elements taken from real creatures, and the
 combinatory possibilities border on the infinite...
Readers browsing through our own anthology will see that the zoology attributable to
dreams is in fact considerably more modest than that attributable to God. We do not know what the dragon means, just as we do not know the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the image of the dragon that is congenial to man's imagination, and thus the dragon arises in many latitudes and ages. It is, one might say, a necessary monster." 

from The Book of Imaginary Beings (Borges, 1954)


Sunday, April 8, 2012

Rosa Mundi a poem...excerpts...H.D. Carr (Aleister Crowley) & Auguste Rodin... 1905







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Limited edition, 488 copies printed with a full page watercolor drawing by Auguste Rodin signed in the plate.




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pencil and wash design by Auguste Rodin




1. ROSE of the World!
Red glory of the secret heart of Love!
Red flame, rose-red, most subtly curled
Into its own infinite flower, all flowers above!
Its flower in its own perfumed passion,
Its faint sweet passion, folded and furled
In flower fashion;
And my deep spirit taking its pure part
Of that voluptuous heart
Of hidden happiness!

2. Arise, strong bow of the young child Eros!
(While the maddening moonlight, the memoried caress
Stolen of the scented rose
Stirs me and bids each racing pulse ache, ache!)
Bend into an agony of art
Whose cry is ever rapture, and whose tears
For their own purity's undivided sake
Are molten dew, as, on the lotus leaves
Sliver-coiled in the Sun
Into green girdled spheres
Purer than all a maiden's dream enweaves,
Lies the unutterable beauty of
The Waters. Yea, arise, divinest dove
Of the Idalian, on your crimson wings
And soft grey plumes, bear me to yon cool shrine
Of that most softly-spoken one,
Mine Aphrodite! Touch the imperfect strings,
Oh thou, immortal, throned above the moon!
Inspire a holy tune
Lighter and lovelier than flowers and wine
Offered in gracious gardens unto Pan
By any soul of man!
...

Matchless, serene, in sacred amplitudes
Of its own royal rapture, deaf and blind
To aught but its own mastery of song
And light, shown ever as silence and deep night
Secret as death and final. Let me long
Never again for aught! This great delight
Involves me, weaves me in its pattern of bliss,
Seals me with its own kiss,
Draws me to thee with every dream that glows,
Poet, each word! Maiden, each burden of snows
Extending beyond sunset, beyond dawn!
O Rose, inviolate, utterly withdrawn
In the truth: -- for this is truth: Love knows!
Ah! Rose of the World! Rose! Rose!


excerpts from Rosa Mundi by H. D. Carr (Aleister Crowley)



Thursday, December 1, 2011

Pinax microcosmographicus...Johann Remmelin & Hara Sanshin ...Flap books





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Johann Remmelin's Pinax Microcosmographicus  1667


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Japanese version of Johann Remmelin's Pinax Microcosmographicus. Copy made by Hara Sanshin, 17c.

more early Japanese anatomical illustrations HERE



Monday, November 14, 2011

Frederick Carter... The Dragon of the Alchemists... 1918






Frederick Carter’s deep interest in alchemy and all aspects of the supernatural and the occult, led him to produce an esoteric symbolism which is apparent throughout his work. Nowhere is this displayed more clearly than in his works for The Dragon of the Alchemists. Frederick Carter provided little or no explanation regarding the significance of his imagery which combines symbols of established religion with those of mysticism and it is likely that he intended the meaning of many of his images to remain shrouded in mystery.


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Persus


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Ship of Dreams



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The Balance


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The Babe of Fire


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Silence



To-day it is maintained that a certain morbid psychological alteration in what is called "the function of reality" bears traces of archaic thought: though what is called archaic may be basic and independent of morbidity. It was accepted without hesitation in the Renaissance that myth extended the range of mental vision, and mythical incidents and classical names were so used until that mode of metaphorical expression became stereotyped. The subjective response and understanding died; a rationalised meaning took its place and nullified its appeal. But the "libido" was then, and is yet, capable of being led into sublimer paths by the use of myth, image, and metaphor: a sound mode of analogy had, as it ever has had, an impetus and a power of moving the mind that brings poetry to life. The poet was a stargazer, and found in his heaven the images of perfection.
from ~ The Dragon of the Alchemists



Saturday, November 5, 2011

Austin Osman Spare ... Illustration...1909



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Cujus est solum ejus est usque ad coelum 1909


from

On the Oxford circuit, and other verses  by Mr Justice Darling 1909

 
CUJUS EST SOLUM EJUS EST USQUE 
AD COELUM 

'ELUSIVE maxim! Hardly Heaven 
they hold 
Whose lands in fee to central Hell 

descend. 
Though from the soil its lords the 
stars behold, 
With the thick air extremest titles end. 




Saturday, July 30, 2011

Oskar Kokoschka... The Dreaming youths... 1907/08



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Renowned as an Expressionist painter, the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) began his career in the decorative arts, studying book illustration, printmaking and typography alongside life drawing at Vienna’s School of Applied Arts between 1904 and 1908. The Dreaming Youths, begun in November 1907 and printed the following June, was Kokoschka’s first major graphic series, produced at the age of 21 while he was still a student. It started as a commission for a children’s picture-book, but Kokoschka set aside his brief after the first illustration, adding verses to create a complex ‘picture-poem’ exploring the desires and anxieties of adolescent sexuality. He described it as ‘a kind of record, in words and pictures, of my own state of mind at the time’, in particular of his love for Lilith Lang, the sister of a fellow student, who appears with him in the final image, The Girl Li and I. He wrote later that ‘the book was my first love-letter’, although his relationship with Lilith had ended by the time it appeared.

 The Dreaming Youths was one of Kokoschka’s most significant early statements, and the frank, erotic metaphor and personal mythology introduced here would become central to his later artistic productions, both visual and literary.

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The girl Li and I 




Saturday, July 23, 2011

The Story of the Eye ...Andre Masson..book cover



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Cover sketch for George Bataille's Story of the Eye - first edition 1928 - André Masson



"And it struck me that death was the sole outcome of my erection, and if Simone and I were killed, then the universe of our unbearable personal vision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars, fully unrelated to any external gazes and realizing in a cold state, without human delays or detours, something that strikes me as the goal of my sexual licentiousness: a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating..."


 George Bataille's Story of the Eye


 previous post > George Bataille



Monday, July 18, 2011

Friday, July 8, 2011

Boetius Adams Bolswert. (ca. 1580-1633).. emblem..



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What is mine in heaven and so what should I want on earth from Thee?



from the Pia Desideria Emblematis Elegiis by Hugo Hermann one of the most popular spiritual love emblem book ever published, illustrated with the beautiful emblematic designs of the great baroque artist Boetius Adams Bolswert.




Friday, April 29, 2011

Austin Osman Spare ... Ugly Ecstasy ...Satyr...



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from the Book of Ugly Ecstasy 1924 - Fulgur 1996



it would be sentimental to say that the figures in Ugly Ectasy and Automatic Drawings
are happy despite theirhideous appearances....in the words of WH Audens poem, 'In Memory of Sigmund Freud' -

Down among the lost people like Dante, down
To the stinking fosse where the injured
Lead the ugly life of the rejected.

Nevertheless, Spare signed off Automatic Drawing on a defiant and innuendo-laden note: "Great is he who pleasures this difficult life," he wrote, and  "He has found wisdom who knows how to spend"*

*Victorian euphemism for ejaculation.


excerpt from Austin Osman Spare - The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist










Monday, April 11, 2011