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Circles: Charles Henri Ford
Charles Henri Ford’s vanity turns 100 today. Its owner, poet and publisher Charles Henri Ford, was by all reliable accounts born in Mississippi on this day in 1908 but he insisted that he was born in...
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Pearls: Vali Myers
We lived in the streets, in the cafes, like a pack of mongrel dogs. We had our very own codes. Students and people with jobs were kept out. As for the tourists who came around to gawk at...
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Laure Albin-Guillot | micrography
Hugely prolific French photographer Laure Albin-Guillot (1879-1962) embraced numerous styles in her career, including fashion photography, male and female nudes as well as portraits of literary...
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Finding the Woman Who Didn’t Exist
“Decadence as an aesthetic movement has always illustrated the fact that interesting things are more likely to be happening on the margins than at the center.” So declared Melanie C. Hawthorne in a...
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New impressions
Rodney Graham, Camera Obscura Mobile, 1996 Last winter, Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia put together an exhibition of artefacts related to the writings of Raymond Roussel, France’s literary exception non...
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Arthur Cravan Memorial Society
Your blogger is back in sunny Berlin (and as of [cranes neck towards window] right now I can say that without irony) and catching up on things missed while reacquainting himself with the gastronomic...
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Dress-down Friday: Lulu
I never visit Deviates, Inc. without seeing, reading or learning something new. My latest discovery is Lulu – not to be confused with the shouting ’60s pop star or Frank Wedekind’s femme fatale. No,...
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Remembrance of Things to Come
Yesterday’s gallery was by way of introduction to Remembrance of Things to Come, a 2003 film study of Denise Bellon’s life and career which I caught recently. It was made by Bellon’s filmmaker...
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A fountain of ink
An elderly lady sits in her apartment among her bric-à-brac, reminiscing about different places she has lived. She chats with her housekeeper, and later a neighbour drops in. A cosy enough domestic...
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Missy and Willy
I doubt there’s a word, or words, which can do justice to the astonishments below. This, ladies and gentlemen and fabulous gradations betwixt, is Mathilde de Morny. Born 150 years ago today, she was...
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Willy Michel | photobooth portraits
As we saw yesterday, French photographer Willy Michel set up the first photobooth in Paris in 1928. There he pioneered the “selfie with star”, which has become the red-carpet scourge of anyone anywhere...
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Photographies, encore
Remember last November’s blow-out of photographic wonders? They’re doing it again tomorrow – that is, Sotheby’s in Paris are once again staging an auction of the greatest names in photography from the...
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Places: Théâtre des Champs-Elysées
View Larger Map On the eve of the First World War, on the auspiciously palindromic date of 31.3.13, Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Elysées opened its doors. It was the newest concert hall of a city whose...
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Dress-down Friday: Loie Fuller
Heat gotcha down? Allow me to propose something light for the start of the (Northern) summer. Here we have American dancer Loie Fuller, who wowed Belle Époque Paris with her hypnotic twirling under...
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The Bearded Heart
By 1923, Dadaism had more or less run its course. The revolutionary anti-art movement was riven by infighting and arguably had no other option than to turn its nihilistic energies on itself. At the...
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Paris is burning
Society aesthete Baron de Redé died nine years ago, and so he was spared the sight of his life’s work, the preservation of Paris’s Hôtel Lambert, going up in flames early this morning. The town...
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Dress-down Friday: Gerda Wegener’s 1913 fashions
Around here, Dress-down Friday is usually dedicated to individuals of outstandingly idiosyncratic style, so this entry is a little off-beam. At first glance these images, which all date from 1913,...
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Louis XI and the stolen umbrellas
In The Trembling of the Veil, W. B. Yeats recalls a visit to the Parisian home of poet Paul Verlaine, there encountering a “slovenly, ragged man”. Unnamed in the book, it is none other than our...
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Rose d’amour
Why I am only finding this out now I do not know, but: Paris’s array of enticements is currently augmented by an exhibition dedicated to the wonderful Pierre Loti, French writer, adventurer and...
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Arthur Cravan est vivant! (encore)
Well, look who’s back. Again. Swiss-born boxer/poet/shit-stirrer Arthur Cravan is the subject of the latest edition of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s magazine La Règle du jeu. Cravan, who embarked from the...
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