Sopor Aeternus – Dead Souls

Dead Souls
(Almas muertas)
Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows
“Es reiten die Toten so schnell” (or: the Vampyre Sucking At His Own Vein) (2003)
Derechos reservados: http://www.soporaeternus.de/

SOPOR AETERNUS: It is safe to SLEEP alone

“It is safe to SLEEP alone”,taken from the album “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GHOST?” (release date April 29th, 2011) by SOPOR AETERNUS & The Ensemble Of Shadows. It is part of the limited BOX/BOOK-edition, which (unless it is sold out by now) can be ordered here:

http://www.infrarot.de/sopor-aeternus/have-you-seen-this-ghost/2008266

The clip was filmed (or rather ‘video-ed’) in November 2009, January/November 2010 and February 2011. Edited in March 2011 by AVC.

Original version of this song (simply entitled “Sleep”) was written by Angelo Badalamenti (music) and Marianne Faithfull/Frank McGuiness (lyrics) and can be found on Marianne Faithfull’s album “A Secret Life”.

Francisco Goya The Witches’ Flight The Disasters of War

Francisco de Goya (1746-1828)
Black Paintings: Two Old Men Eating Soup

Two Old Men Eating Soup (Spanish: Dos viejos comiendo sopa) is one of the Black Paintings created by Francisco de Goya between 1819-23. By this time, Goya was in his mid-70s and deeply disillusioned. He painted the works on the interior walls of the house known as “The House of the Deaf Man” (Quinta del Sordo). They were not intended for public display. Two Old Men Eating Soup likely occupied a position above the main door to the house, between Leocadia and Two Old Men.

In the image, two elderly figures loom forward from a black background; although they are assumed to be men, their gender is not readily apparent. The mouth of the left figure is drawn into a grimace, possibly from lack of teeth. In stark contrast to this animated expression, the face of the other figure hardly seems alive at all. Its eyes are black hollows and the head in general bears the aspect of a skull.

Like the rest of the Black Paintings, it was transferred to canvas in 1873-74 under the supervision of Salvador Martínez Cubells, a curator at the Museo del Prado. The owner, Baron Emile d’Erlanger, donated the canvases to the Spanish state in 1881, and they are now on display at the Museo del Prado.

The Age
Osip Mandelstam

My age, my beast, is there anyone
Who can peer into your eyes
And with his own blood fuse
Two centuries’ worth of vertebrae?
The creating blood gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
And the parasite just trembles
On the threshold of new days.

While the creature still has life,
The spine must be delivered,
While with the unseen backbone
A wave distracts itself.
Again they’ve brought the peak of life
Like a sacrificial lamb,
Like a child’s supple cartilage—
The age of infant earth.

To free the age from its confinement,
To instigate a brand new world,
The discordant, tangled days
Must be linked, as with a flute.
It’s the age that rocks the swells
With humanity’s despair,
And in the undergrowth a serpent breathes
The golden measure of the age.

Still the shoots will swell
And the green buds sprout
But your spinal cord is crushed,
My fantastic, wretched age!
And in lunatic beatitude
You look back, cruel and weak,
Like a beast that once was agile,
At the tracks left by your feet.

The creating blood gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
The lukewarm cartilage of oceans
Splashes like a seething fish ashore.
And from the bird net spread on high
From the humid azure stones,
Streams a flood of helpless apathy
On your single, fatal wound.

Translated by Marc Adler

The Disasters of War

Goya changed humankind’s perception of war. His work is so powerful that, if people had grasped the lessons he offered, he might have changed war itself. He might have helped get rid of it.

Human nature doesn’t work like that, unfortunately. The lesson learned is that, although wars are fought differently these days and advancing technology enables people to be killed differently, war goes on. When it’s not going on, the threat of it goes on, as has been well demonstrated in recent times.

Before Goya, artists often showed war as heroic, an ennobling act. Richard Schickel wrote in The World of Goya 1746-1828: “On huge canvases, soldiers marched off to martial strains leaving behind cheering populations and adoring ladies. Victory was the attainable goddess; honour, the glorifying force.

“Goya changed all that. He painted – and drew – war as it is, honoured by isolated acts of heroism, but more often an inferno that can brutalise man to the point where he commits acts against his fellow beings that exceed the most gruesome imaginings.”

Goya’s war etchings dealt with the Spanish insurrection against the French puppet king Joseph Bonaparte, which began in 1808 and developed into the Peninsula War. They were published 35 years after his death in a collection of 80 plates entitled The Disasters of War.

There are only two known artist’s proof sets, one in the British Museum, the other in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Eight editions of the book were made from the plates, with each successive edition declining in quality.

A copy of the rare first edition, said to be from the collection of the Infanta Maria de la Paz of Spain and Francisco de Asis, the Duke of Cadiz and King of Spain (1822-1902), was secured by an anonymous buyer at Sotheby’s in London last year – for about $58,000.

Rex Irwin’s art gallery in Woollahra will exhibit prints of the 80 works from today. Fifty of the 80 prints have already been sold, at prices ranging from $1500 to $5000. Goya is known as an artist’s artist and many of the prints have gone to artists.

The art critic Bernard Berenson saw in Goya’s work “the beginnings of our modern anarchy”.

Jakob Rosenberg, another critic, wrote: “These sharply drawn scenes must be essentially true; for Goya … records like a seismograph the deep revolution in philosophic, social and political concepts that shook the western European world in his time.”

Schickel said that Goya travelled through Spain sketching what he saw and felt. It would have been difficult for him to romanticise the Peninsula War even if had wanted to.

“The French tortured and mutilated their prisoners, chopping off limbs and organs even after the men were dead,” Schickel wrote. “The Spaniards reacted in kind, hacking up the bodies of the enemy and subjecting captives to long agonising deaths. Hunger, deprivation and misery ravaged the land.”

Goya dramatically captures all the horrors. The result is among the most powerful indictments of war and its aftermath.

Francisco Goya y Lucientes was born in Aragon in 1746 and was deafened in 1792. From that time, he heard, as well as saw, with his eyes.

The Australian artist Nicholas Harding says: “Maybe today Goya would have been a photographer or documentary film-maker recording some catastrophe of war. The results would be unsettling, but would lack the visceral alchemy and poetry of the mark-making process.

“Goya’s representations of these heinous acts and crimes against humanity remain as relevant today as at the time of their creation. Using his powers of observation and vigorous composition in tandem with an inventive and masterful use of the etching medium, Goya achieves extraordinary empathy with the human condition.”

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald – Tony Stephens

Francisco Goya: The Disasters of War 1810-1820

‘The Disasters of War’ (Spanish: Los Desastres de la Guerra) are a series of 80 prints created between 1810 and 1820 by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya (1746–1828). Although he did not make known his intention when creating the plates, art historians view them as a visual protest against the violence of the 1808 Dos de Mayo Uprising, the subsequent Peninsular War of 1808–14 and the setbacks to the liberal cause following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814. During the conflicts between Napoleon’s French Empire and Spain, Goya retained his position as first court painter to the Spanish crown and continued to produce portraits of the Spanish and French rulers. Although deeply affected by the war, he kept private his thoughts on the art he produced in response to the conflict and its aftermath. He was in poor health and almost deaf when, at 62, he began work on the prints. They were not published until 1863, 35 years after his death. It is likely that only then was it considered politically safe to distribute a sequence of artworks criticising both the French and restored Bourbons.

The name by which the series is known today is not Goya’s own. His handwritten title on an album of proofs given to a friend reads: Fatal consequences of Spain’s bloody war with Bonaparte, and other emphatic caprices (Spanish: Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte, Y otros caprichos enfáticos). Aside from the titles or captions given to each print, these are Goya’s only known words on the series. With these works, he breaks from a number of painterly traditions. He rejects the bombastic heroics of most previous Spanish war art to show the effect of conflict on individuals. In addition he abandons colour in favour of a more direct truth he found in shadow and shade.

The series was produced using a variety of intaglio printmaking techniques, mainly etching for the line work and aquatint for the tonal areas, but also engraving and drypoint. As with many other Goya prints, they are sometimes referred to as aquatints, but more often as etchings. The series is usually considered in three groups which broadly mirror the order of their creation. The first 47 focus on incidents from the war and show the consequences of the conflict on individual soldiers and civilians. The middle series (plates 48 to 64) record the effects of the famine that hit Madrid in 1811–12, before the city was liberated from the French. The final 17 reflect the bitter disappointment of liberals when the restored Bourbon monarchy, encouraged by the Catholic hierarchy, rejected the Spanish Constitution of 1812 and opposed both state and religious reform. Since their first publication, Goya’s scenes of atrocities, starvation, degradation and humiliation have been described as the “prodigious flowering of rage” as well as the “work of a memory that knew no forgiveness.” The serial nature in which the plates unfold has led some to see the images as similar in nature to photography.

Pilgrimage To San Isidro

It has always been a struggle to capture war through images, attempting to explain its horror and violence without the experience. Before photographs and photojournalism, some artists took the responsibility to show the atrocities of war. Jacques Callot, a baroque printmaker, published a series of etchings entitled Les Misères De La Guerre (The Miseries and Misfortunes of War). The etchings documented the French invasion and occupation of Lorraine (now part of France) during the 1630s. From 1810 to 1820 Francisco Goya, the court painter to the Spanish Crown, created a series of etchings Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War), depicting the violence of the Peninsula War in which the Spanish revolted against French occupation. The etchings were kept private and never printed until 35 years after his death, at a time when the works were “less likely to offend.” Goya’s etchings are divided into three sequential events—war, famine, and the return of Fernando VII and the Spanish Inquisition to power. The group of etched plates depicts women and children executed, girls raped, slaughters with piles of bodies, and desecrated and mutilated bodies as well as the despair of a famine that followed.

Susan Sontag writes in the book Regarding the Pain of Others, “The ghoulish cruelties in The Disasters of War are meant to awaken, shock, wound, the viewer . . . With Goya, a new standard for responsiveness to suffering enters art . . . The account of war’s cruelties is fashioned as an assault on the sensibility of the viewer.” Sontag argues that though works like Goya’s, and other drawings and paintings, are “made” while photographs are “taken,” the photographer still decides what to frame—what to include and exclude. But photographs, unlike handmade images, can act as evidence. Looking at War