Table of Contents: Art

Sweet Savage Love
Uppercase Magazine #10

> Essays & Other Writing, Art, Books, Design

Romance_1 Romance_2

The classic paperback “bodice-ripper” is an undeniably hot mess – the very things that make it disreputable – the tawdry, formulaic, overheated melodrama rendered in prose so purple it might as well be written in marmalade – are exactly what makes it awesome.

The modern era of the romance novel begins in 1972, with the publication of Katheleen Woodiwiss’ “The Flame and the Flower” Two things about it had seismic implications on the genre. It was one of the first romance novels to be published initially as a paperback, to be distributed promiscuously and cheaply in 5 and dimes and department stores. And, pertaining to the amorous coupling detailed within, it got down to some frisky, frisky business. In detail.

Along with giving succor and stimulation to it’s devoted readership, the modern romance novel preformed an additional cultural service. The liberated sensibilities inside the books called for equally brazen cover art. This need provided a welcome haven to a recently dispossessed cadre – the pulp and movie poster artists. In the mid sixties photography began to supplant illustration. Pressed out of the genres that made their careers, and in some cases fortunes, some illustrators retired to fine art, some to advertising. Others, in the case of Robert McGinnis and Robert Maguire – two of the absolute best – migrated to romance covers.

Robert McGinnis is one of  the deans of American illustration. His reputation rests on the more 1000 pulps that literally define the genre, as well as the iconic movie posters he did for Barbarella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Odd Couple. Running through all his work is a superb level of craft and technique. He painted the indelible James Bond posters for Thunderball, Never Say Never Again, and Diamonds are Forever. However his masterpiece may be a serial one. McGinnis did scores of covers for the long running Carter Brown crime series. Each is a lovingly painted lusty variation on a simple theme – a fetching seductress, a come hither pose, a hint of danger, and a hastily sketched background.

When you think of the classic image of the crime noir femme fatale, with her ruby lips, china white skin, mane of technicolor hair, you are thinking of the work of Robert A. Maguire. His was a rougher technique than McGinnisis’, but no less controlled. What he sacrificed in finesse he gained in melodramatic effect. He preferred slashing bands of over-saturated colors, calligraphic and sketchy brushwork, and high can you buy vicodin legally in mexico contrast, nearly electric highlights. Prolific even given the absurdly demanding standards of the day, from the 50s to the late 60’s he painted thousands of covers. Maguire did masterful work in just about every category of pulp – men’s magazines, crime novels, sexploitaiton, and lascivious historical romps.

What makes both McGinnis’s and Maguire’s romance cover paintings so compelling are the the techniques and sensibilities that they brought over from the pulps. Their penchant for eggshell hues, alabaster skin tones, muted colors and gestural brushstrokes gave the paintings a real allure. Also, they conjured powerful atmospherics – an epic historical sweep, a genuine sexiness, more than a touch of danger, and a sense of swashbuckling adventure.

Both Maguire’s and McGinnis’s paintings lift the covers from from usual ham-handed, frosted glop to the status of real melodramatic art – which requires, along with an overheated imagination, more than a fair share of skill and technique.

Maguire’s covers, while painted with vigor, hew a little closer to the conventions of the form and seldom transcend them. However, he remained a master at conjuring iconic women, and the romance paperback has seldom seen heroines as genuinely riveting and seductive.

McGinnis’s work is simply exquisite. Also the fact that he was rendering complete backgrounds in-line with the conventions of the genre gave his work and unprecedented lushness. As a painter he was in his prime, with a deftness suggestive of the the Andrew Wyeth-esqe fine art he was making concurrently.

Again, he distinguished himself over the course of a series. In this case it was the first 13 books by author Johanna Lindsey. In addition to the quality of the artwork, design-wise, they are seriously great. The typesetting is perfect in its own way and the compositions unusually dynamic and well ordered. As a exercise in serial design they are superlative, issuing forth in double-barrelled salvos of modes – color blocked, on-white, and full lurid bleeds. Aesthetically, these are the heaving peaks of the genre, simply the best romance paperback covers ever made.

(The McGinnis books are taken from my personal collection. More on his work can be found in The Paperback Covers of Robert McGinnis by Art Scott, and Tapestry: The Paintings of Robert McGinnis by Arnie & Cathy Fenner. The Maguire images are from Jim Silke’s fabulous survey Dames, Dolls & Gun Molls. Also, to anyone inclined to this stuff, I also heartily recommend the blog “Get Yer Bodices Ripped Here”)

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Fine art’s always gone for filthy lucre

> A Commonplace Book, > Reader's Digest of the Blog, Art, Books, Culture, Fashion

Seriously, this is a must read. It’s a detailed description of the unhinged, lunatic magnificence of a 15th century “living painting.” As the author Anita Albus makes vividly clear – “it’s pointless to look for the line where kitsch ends and fine art begins.” Utterly gobsmacking… just contemplating it nearly defeats the imagination.

(Taken from Albus’ The Art of Arts, which I’ve only just begun, but is emerging as one of the best books I’ve ever read on the mechanics and philosophy of painting.)

A Signet Gothic

Art, Books

She had come back to bury the nightmare past – only to find new love and new terror…

Bright Young Things, Part I

Art, Culture, Poetry


They did not intend to distinguish between the essence
Of wit and wallpaper trellis.
What they cared
Was how the appointments of the age appeared
Under the citron gaslight incandescence.

Virtue was vulgar, sin a floral passion
And death a hansom at the door, while they
Kept faith with a pomaded sense of history In their fashion.

Behind the domino, those fringed and fanned
Exclusive girls, prinked with the peacock’s eye
Noted, they believed, the trickle of a century
Like a thin umbrella in a black-gloved hand.

– Yellow Book, Muriel Spark, c. 1951 (photograph, One More, by Mariczka, Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine)

Tomas van Houtryve

Art, Culture

Viewing these shots by documentary photographer Tomas Van Houtryve is a complicated experience. They pull powerfully at two distinct psychological strands – on the one hand they are thoroughly, almost voluptuously, gorgeous. On the other, they are deeply unsettling. In each shot, intermingled with the beauty, you can palpably feel communism’s total soul-crushing weight. They are all drawn from Van Houtryve’s ongoing project to document the last tattered communist holdouts – among them North Korea, Moldova, Laos, and China. The project is but a part of a deeply impressive body of work, all motivated by a deep, philosophical and humanitarian approach, under-girded by a superb sense of aesthetics. His work can seen here. He is also a gifted writer, and the stories behind the photographs, told on his blog, are fascinating. Start with his account of infiltrating North Korea, part one of which is here. (Hat tip Ashley Gilbertson, whose new project, Bedrooms of the Fallen, documenting the bedrooms of soldiers killed in Iraq & Afghanistan, is also well worth your attention.)

chronic personal tourism

> A Commonplace Book, > Reader's Digest of the Blog, > Transmissions, Art, Culture

We read… enraptured by [a] gallant attempt to distill a precious meaning from life’s experience – to make a spot on a globe a window into universal circumstance, and to fashion of one’s personal chronic tourism a crystal whose facts reflect an entire life…  – John Updike

Came across the Updike blurb on the back cover of Joseph Brodkey’s Watermark, a vivid personal account of his travels in Venice. What struck me first, as it always does, is the precision cut finish of the language. But as I read, and re-read the quote, it’s buy vicodin overnight impact bloomed and broadened to nothing less than a pocket manifesto. Isn’t this “gallant attempt,” this “chronic personal tourism” the very enterprise we’re up to over here. Updike nails exactly the motives behind documenting the passionate appreciation of the quintessence of things in daily life that so delight and move us. It’s not just cerebral, chin scratching, aesthetic trainspotting. It’s a double act of alchemy – to distill an essence, and to extract from that essence something fundamental to human experience.

Art: Lee Price, Cocoa Puffs, Oil on Linen, 44” x 62”

The Art Imperative, Part I

> A Commonplace Book, > Reader's Digest of the Blog, Art, Culture

The Lives of Others is among my absolute favorite films – every time I see it I dwell on its themes and implications for days. In light of a recent viewing, three interconnected posts: this appreciation, an appeal, and some verse.

The flick is about many things: The mechanics of loyalty under duress, the immutability of human corruption, the tragedy of moral compromise, the perverse bond of the spy to his quarry. It has the scaffolding of a tightly wound Cold War thriller and the drapery of a melodrama.

At its core, though, is what it has to say about art and its role in society and, ultimately, to the human condition.

Art, it makes clear, is far from ornament – it is fundamental and necessary. It is the power to reorder our world, to interrogate it. It is a question and an answer. It allows us to explore the topography of our lives and society, the edges of what is permissible or possible. Art gives the idea of freedom where to buy vicodin in los angeles shape, tangibility.

It’s why, when oppression looms, art becomes an imperative – an act of bravery and service. Art forms a haven where freedom can pool, exist, be tended to, shepherded, and protected. It becomes elevated ground from which to fight back.

The entire film frames a simple, gigantic, sobering question – What would we do? This dilemma is what throws the three main characters into sharp relief; the surveillance drone and true believer softened by by prolonged exposure to art and the vitality of life; the self-assured, savvy director galvanized to bravery; the wreck of an actress who’s collapsing under a slurry of accommodations, addictions, compromises and betrayals. Their situations serve the plot, yes, but taken together they provoke an implicit challenge, especially to those who live by and for the arts today. What would we do?

(art by Claudia Varosio)


The Art Imperative, Part II

Art, Culture

The mere existence of Kabul Dreams, Afghanistan’s beloved independent rock band, is an emphatic answer to the question posed in The Lives of Others. To rock in Afghanistan is brave and important work. By recording, by performing, they are carving pockets of freedom out of a very harsh and hostile landscape.

My pal Jim Daniels is campaigning to help fund their first international tour. Jim is deployed with the 344th Military Information Support Operations Company, formerly known as Psyops. He’s doing deeply good work there, among many things helping shore up the essential building blocks of society: literacy, art, order vicodin online forum & culture.

The campaign for Kabul Dreams is being done in conjunction with Dart Music International a nonprofit organization based in Austin, Texas. DMI works to introduce the general public in the United States to the modern face of countries and cultures from around the world.

Art is more than an act of resistance. It is a solvent, and it dissolves away the deadening of the human spirit that oppression requires to thrive. Please support this effort. You can read more and donate here, and on Facebook, here. More on Kabul Dreams here, here, and here. Thank you.

The Art Imperative, Part III

> A Commonplace Book, Art, Culture, Poetry

The Power of Taste
Zbigniew Herbert

It didn’t require great character at all
our refusal disagreement and resistance
we had a shred of necessary courage
but fundamentally it was a matter of taste
…Yes taste
in which there are fibers of soul the cartilage of conscience

Who knows if we had been better and more attractively tempted sent
rose-skinned women thin as a wafer
or fantastic creatures from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch
but what kind of hell was there at this time
a wet pit the murderers’ alley the barrack
called a palace of justice
a home-brewed Mephisto in a Lenin jacket
sent Aurora’s grandchildren out into the field
boys with potato faces
very ugly girls with red hands

Verily their rhetoric was made of cheap sacking
(Marcus Tullius kept turning in his grave)
chains of tautologies a couple of concepts like flails
the dialectics of slaughterers no distinctions in reasoning
syntax deprived of beauty of the subjunctive

So aesthetics can be helpful in life
one should not neglect the study of beauty

Before we declare our consent we must carefully examine
the shape of the architecture the rhythm of the drums and pipes
official colors the despicable ritual of funerals

Our eyes and ears refused obedience
the princes of our senses proudly chose exile

It did not require great character at all
we had a shred of necessary courage
but fundamentally it was a matter of taste
…Yes taste
that commands us to get out to make a wry face draw out a sneer
even if for this the precious capital of the body the head
must fall

(art: Pax Sovietica Polish Solidarity Movement Poster, 1980s, © Stapleton Collection)

Damned Flappers

Art, Books, Design

I’ve had an itch to read Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned lately… mostly because I’ve had the phrase echoing in my noggin, thanks to an odd propensity of my iphone to play the the similarly titled song by Ultravox!

Anyway, poking around online for a suitable edition led to some fine discoveries. First and foremost are the two volumes above, designed by the able Megan Wilson. In fact her whole Vintage Classics series is gorgeously rendered – spare and powerfully evocative. Browse them, and more, on her site, here. I found Beautiful and the Damned over at the Caustic Cover Critic, an excellent Australian book design site. Its author, James Morrison was kind enough to refer me to Mme. Wilson’s work. The editions above are available, priced to move, here & here.

Ultravox!: The Wild, The Beautiful & the Damned [download]
[audio:https://shepelavy.com/audio/Ultravox_Wild_Beautiful_Damned.mp3]

Seasons, Merry, Best, Etc…

> Transmissions, Art

Happy, etc…, to you and yours over the holidays. I’ll leave you with some remarkable photographs by Matthias Heiderich, a young photographer and musician based in Berlin. I stumbled across his Flickr stream the other night and was floored – warmth and emotion paired with abstract geometries and chilly ambiance. Take a moment and treat yourselves to more of his work, here. Sometime next week, I’ll post 2010’s For Your Pleasure… a download-able mix of my year in music. Then onto 2011. ‘Til then, then…

The Outfit

Art, Books

Splash pages from Darwyn Cooke’s masterful comic adaptation of Richard Stark’s hard-boiled noir, The Outfit. In and of themselves they are wonderful pieces of art – gestural, sketchy, but deliberate, brilliantly composed, and thoughtfully detailed. The whole book, though, like it’s predecessor the Hunter, is fantastic, distinguished by innovative graphic storytelling techniques. The most striking is a bravura sequence detailing a series of simultaneous heists, illustrated in successive retro styles that evoke Noel Douglas Sickles, the UPA Studio, and classic Hanna-Barbera. Examples from it can be seen here, as part of an in-depth interview Cooke conducted with the Comics Alliance. With the now classic New Frontier, Cooke transcended his inspirations. With the Parker series he’s securing his reputation as one of comics defining talents.

Blow up Blow out

Art, Culture, Movies

Some years ago I attended an evening of mime by Marcel Marceau, an elaborate exercise in aesthetic purification during which the audience kept applauding its own appreciation of culture and beauty, i.e., every time they thought they recognized what was supposed to be going on.

So begins Pauline Kael’s Tourist in the City of Youth – a comprehensive take-down of the circus of bullshit in, and in the wake of, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Published in The New Republic in 1967, it’s a thrilling, bracing read, swinging from one exquisite demolition to the next.

She nails the hypocrisy of “highbrow” art’s seeming disdain for pop culture while simultaneously drawing strength and vitality from it. I adore her reminder that, for all the easy moralizing, the frisky, colorful, grass infused Mod scene the movie depicts seems, if not harmless, more than a little, um… fun… A big chunk of the essay dismantles the cheap profundity of lazy symbols, easy targets, and disingenuous critics:

People seem awfully eager to abandon sense and perspective and humor and put on the newest fashion in hair shirts; New York critics who are just settling into their upper-East Side apartments write as if they’re leaving for a monastery in the morning… a surprising lot of people seem willing to accept assumptions such as: the fashion photographer is symbolic of life in our society and time; he turns to easy sex because his life and ours is empty, etc. Mightn’t people like easy sex even if their lives were reasonably full? And is sex necessarily empty just because the people are strangers to each other, or is it just different? And what’s so terrible about fast, easy success? Don’t most of the people who cluck their condemnation wish they’d had it?

Aces, just aces. The whole thing is a masterpiece of dense, sharp, and admirably personal criticism, sure, but given its scope and depth it’s practically an aesthetic and cultural manifesto. She’s arguing, as always, for honesty and passion, yes – but what she’s really getting at, what she finds unforgivable, is the emotional distance, the “knowing” disconnection in both filmmakers and critics from their ostensible subject. “Love-hate is what makes drama not only exciting but possible,” and what she loathes, justly, is the lack of love.

ABOVE: absolutely killer cover art for Kael’s perfectly titled 1968 collection of criticism, and the iconic poster for Blow Up (more on its graphic significance here.)

Harry Callahan

Art, Design, Fashion

When I saw these photographs by Harry Callahan reproduced in a magazine, I took them to be photo-realist paintings. It’s the compositions – they’re so deliberate and graphic. What I love about the photo-realist painters that I love is the degree of framing and editing they employ. They hold reality in abstraction, and the intersection of the two is the source of a great deal of the aesthetic impact they deliver. It’s why I was so gobsmacked to find that these images were caught in camera.

Callahan was an engineer with Chrysler Motors in the 40’s, where he joined a camera club. A visit by Ansel can you buy real vicodin online Adams to the club transformed his passion for photography from a hobby into an artistic calling – a search for the intensified image. As he put it – “The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem” – which gets at the essence of his images perfectly. Half a decade later he was hired by Bauhaus legend Liszl Moholy-Nagy to teach photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago. He went on to create the photography program at the RISD. More on Callahan here.