The Fantastic

I found all this fun stuff while browsing through Cornell University Library's cool database site for this kind of thing: The Fantastic in Art and Fiction. Check it out to see much more.

Benjamin Carbonne

The work of Benjamin Carbonne, who I believe might be French Canadian.

Followers of this blog will have guessed that I have an especial interest in painting that toys with, disrupts, distorts or otherwise obscures the human face & figure.

I'm, of course, a great fan of Francis Bacon. It was a while before I found anything that was really effectively carrying that torch. Though, in the past couple of years or so I've come across and posted about somewhat similar artists such as Nicola Samori, Adolfo Bimer and Agostino Arrivabene.

You should visit Benjamin's website, which is in French and has loads more images to peruse.

Max Factor's thirties weirdness

 

EVEN BEAUTY MAY NOW BE REDUCED TO COLD HARD FIGURES

 The nominal Max Factor cosmetics corporation was christened after this old-school makeup mogul. Back in the golden days of Hollywood this guy perfected the faces of a lot of the screen's big wheels and, like many others at the time, developed some delightfully bizarre experiments in the 1930s and 1940s. The "beauty micrometer" is one such example- and not so far off at all from a similar device the Nazis would later use to locate and specify Aryan features. Max Factor, however, was a Polish Jew.