BBC 6 Music: James Blake in Session for Gilles Peterson (Abstract Tease)
(via onjamesblake)
Paul Jacoulet (1896–1960) - French, Japan-based woodblock print artist known for a style that mixed the traditional ukiyo-e style and techniques developed by Jacoulet himself. Jacoulet is considered one of the few western artists to have mastered the art of woodblock printing sufficiently to be recognized in Japan. Jacoulet was a true renaissance man –French but born and raised in Japan, expert in Kabuki, proficient on traditional Japanese musical instruments, a good calligrapher, conversant in several languages, and a recognized butterfly collector. Growing up in Tokyo he was the next door neighbor of ukiyo-e authority Yone Noguchi; he was taught English by Noguchi’s American wife, Leonie Gilmour, and befriended their son, the young Isamu Noguchi. Jacoulet’s father was an ambassador so Paul was widely traveled and was doted upon by his mother. She supported his artistic endeavors all her life. She believed that if French Polynesia was good for Paul Gauguin, then Jacoulet must go there too. She sent him away many winters from Japan to various islands in Micronesia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Although his most valued works are from this part of the world, he also has a substantial number of prints with subjects from China, Korea, all areas of Japan, and Mongolia. Just one print depicts an American.
Jacoulet’s works are also interesting to anthropologists. First because his subject matter was indigenous people in their traditional dress. In 1939 traditional people were the norm in his travels. Today his work is often used as a basis for reconstructing, for example, what Ainu traditional dress looked like by the Ainu themselves in their quest to reconnect with their cultural roots. Second, some of the subjects who posed for Jacoulet are still alive and they are currently being interviewed by a professor in Guam (Donald Rubinstein) to learn more about his artistic process.
Jacoulet was a shameless self-promoter and he sent prints to famous people to enhance his reputation. Mrs. Douglas MacArthur received an annual Christmas gift and his work hung in the General’s headquarters in Tokyo and later at the Waldorf-Astoria. Jacoulet was a flamboyant gay man at a very early date to be out, and his sexual orientation and gender fluidity are clearly reflected in his work. Near the end of his life Jacoulet was barred from entering the US due to his “undesirability” as a gay person. Undeterred, he dressed up in a white suit with a silver headed cane and walked into the US at Niagara Falls. (Source.)
(Source: moika-palace, via deviatesinc)
It almost looks like a glamor shot magazines like Face or advertisers like United Colors of Benetton often throws your way. Her blonde hair looked so soft, her manicured fingernails so red, her glistening bracelet and handbag so readily beside, the red cross aide so solicitous in bending over her that you can almost feel like it has been staged. The woman was an actress named Adela Legarreta Rivas, but she was actually hit by a car and killed on Mexico City’s Avenida Chapultepec in 1979.
She was draped across a fallen pole, her arm hanging like a rag doll’s around it, the bridge of her perfect nose intersected by a single line of blood. It seems as if Edgar Allen Poe, he who elevated deaths of beautiful women into sublime art and said such death is “the most poetical topic in the world”, had taken this photo, but the man who captured this image was Enrique Metinides. Metinides, whose photos often looked like stills from pulp graphic novels and film noirs, is the most accomplished photographer for the Mexican version of tabloid press, the nota roja. As its name (bloody news) suggests, nota roja covers not celebrity scandals, but death and destruction: car crashes, fires, shootouts, suicides, etc.
Metinides is often called Mexican Weegee, but unlike Weegee, Metinides did not tune nightly into the police radio; he volunteered with Red Cross and often arrived at the scene with an ambulance crew. He photographed his first dead body before he was 12, a feat that earned him a nickname El Niño – the Kid – for his precocity. Although his work is not widely known outside of Mexico, this may be changing with a New York show in 2006, and a Time magazine feature recently.
(Source: intoyoureyesmyfaceremains)
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