Der Krieg - The War Art of Otto Dix

Mealtime in the Trenches

 
Gas Victims


Dead Man in the Mud


Front-line Soldier in Brussels


Corpse of a Horse


Stormtroops Advancing under a Gas Attack


Skull


Crater Field near Dontrien Lit Up by Flares


Dead Sentry in the Trenches


Roll Call of Returning Troops


Transporting the Wounded in Houthulst Forest

Collapsed Trenches

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/may/14/art-apocalypse-otto-dix-first-world-war-der-krieg-in-pictures

On show at De La Warr Pavilion 17 May to 27 July
Free entry
Booking and Information: 01424 229 111

A major and rare loan of 19 prints from the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum as a stand-alone display.

Commemorating the centenary of WW1, which began with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June 28 1914, the exhibition will present a selection from the series Der Krieg (The War) 1924.

Made ten years after the beginning of WW1, presumably because it was only then that Dix could return to the experiences that he went through in the trenches, the prints were ground-breaking: through the impact of the images that Dix conjured, and also in the unique combination of multiple print-making techniques that he employed.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they regarded Dix as a degenerate artist and had him sacked from his post as an art teacher at the Dresden Academy. He later moved to Lake Constance in the southwest of Germany. Dix's paintings The Trench and War cripples were exhibited in the state-sponsored Munich 1937 exhibition of degenerate art, Entartete Kunst. They were later burned.

Dix, like all other practicing artists, was forced to join the Nazi government's Reich Chamber of Fine Arts (Reichskammer der bildenden Kuenste), a subdivision of Goebbels' Cultural Ministry (Reichskulturkammer). Membership was mandatory for all artists in the Reich. Dix had to promise to paint only inoffensive landscapes. He still painted an occasional allegorical painting that criticized Nazi ideals.

http://www.dlwp.com/event/otto-dix

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #253

Last night's set lists

At The Habit, York: -

Set 1 - Ron: -
Make You Feel My Love
Autumn Leaves

Set 2 - Da: -
Love Song
Is It Only The Moonlight?

Set 3 - The Elderly Brothers: -
Let It Be Me
Walk Right Back
Crying In The Rain
So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)
Bird Dog
Things We Said Today
Country Roads

A rather quiet night player-wise and somewhat sparce in the bar at times, most punters seeming to prefer the upper tier on what was a very balmy evening. The Elderlys took the opportunity to have a live rehearsal for Bank Holiday Sunday's gig (8pm Sunday 25th May at The Habit) and even snook in a 'new' song at the end.

Mark Wynn finished off the night with one of his trademark, make-it-up-as-you-go-along songs, this one about the joys of shopping at Aldi. An after show acoustic jam followed and we were joined by a guy who just happened to have a pair of brush sticks about his person; with a table top doubling as a drum head, we had percussion too!!

Oh and by the way, don't forget about the gig on Sunday.

Pat Ffrench's The Orchid House Project - Touching the far Horizon

Available now on iTunes: 

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/touching-far-horizon-single/id839705329

Sir Jack Brabham RIP

Sir Jack Brabham obituary
Australian F1 world champion racing driver and car designer who was down-to-earth and possessed a dry sense of humour

Alan Henry
The Guardian

Monday 19 May 2014 

Sir Jack Brabham, who has died aged 88, was one of motor racing's great practical heroes, a tough Australian who applied a down-to-earth attitude to his craft. Not only did he gain three world championship titles, in 1959, 1960 and 1966, but the third was at the wheel of a car bearing his own name. This was a unique achievement in Formula One history and it was made all the more satisfying by the fact that he was 40 when he took that third title crown and regarded as being over the hill by many motor-racing commentators.

During a Formula One career that ran from 1955 until 1970, Brabham competed in 126 grands prix, winning on 14 occasions. For the first six years he drove for the Cooper team, and then set up as a constructor in his own right. Brabham is recalled by all who worked with him as someone who never wasted words. He was shrewd to the point of cunning, a great mechanical improviser in the days when racing drivers still got their hands dirty helping on the mechanical front and an all-rounder prepared to turn his hand to any chore.

The grandson of a cockney who went to Australia in 1885 and the son of Tom, a greengrocer, and his wife, May, Jack was born in Hurstville, 10 miles south of Sydney. He joined the Royal Australian Air Force at the age of 18, very much wanting to fly, but by then it was 1944 and such was the progress of the second world war that there was more demand for mechanics than aircrew. He was demobbed in 1947 and then succumbed to the lure of motor racing.

After proving highly competitive on the Australian national racing scene, Brabham aspired to a professional racing career. He was well ahead of his time when he attracted sponsorship from Redex for his Cooper-Bristol, but the Australian motorsport authorities made him remove the advertising.

In 1955 he left for Britain and became involved with the father-and-son racing-car builders Charles and John Cooper, making his Formula One debut in the 1955 British grand prix at Aintree in a central-seater Cooper sports car. Thereafter Brabham rode the crest of the Formula One wave as Cooper rewrote the parameters of contemporary car performance, their rear-engined models superseding all their traditionally front-engined rivals.

Although Stirling Moss won the first Cooper victory in the 1958 Argentine Grand Prix, once Brabham hit his stride in the summer of 1959 there was no stopping him. With their rivals Vanwall and Maserati having dropped out of the scene, Ferrari still wrestling with their outdated front-engined Dino 246 and Colin Chapman's Lotus team yet to come to full flower, Cooper enjoyed a spectacular two-year run of success.

During that time Brabham won seven races and two world championships. It was perfect timing; the right machine, driven by the right man, at the right moment. Nevertheless, Brabham had been nurturing long-term plans to manufacture production racing cars for the junior international formulas in his own right. This project relied on the collaboration of his old Australian friend and engineer Ron Tauranac, and the process inevitably moved to its logical conclusion with the construction of Brabham's own Formula One car.

Brabham left Cooper at the end of the 1961 season, by which time their star was fading, and gave the first Brabham Formula One car its race debut in the following year's German grand prix. From 1963 to 1965 Brabham employed the talented American Dan Gurney as his team-mate, the Californian winning the 1964 French and Mexican Grands Prix. But with the advent of the new three-litre Formula One engine regulations at the start of 1966, Brabham pulled another masterstroke by arranging for the Australian Repco company to build him a Formula One V8 engine to power his car.

Brabham scored his first victory at the wheel of his own vehicle in the 1966 French Grand Prix at Reims and followed this up with wins in the British, Dutch and German races. Although a taciturn personality, Brabham memorably projected some dry humour just before the Dutch race at Zandvoort by hobbling out on to the grid wearing a false beard and leaning on a stick. It was the wry Australian's reply to those who thought he was past it.

The Brabham-Repco momentum continued into 1967, when Jack's team-mate Denny Hulme won the championship, although by the end of the season the writing was on the wall for the Repco V8. The new Ford-financed Cosworth DFV V8 had made its debut in the Lotus 49 in that year's Dutch Grand Prix and every other engine was suddenly reduced to the role of also-ran. Brabham soldiered on with Repco power until the end of 1968, then joined the switch to Cosworth power for the following season. He won his final grand prix victory in South Africa at the start of 1970 and at the end of it called time on his career.

In that final year Brabham's chief mechanic was a 22-year-old from Surrey – Ron Dennis – today the multi-millionaire chairman of McLaren, one of Formula One's most successful racing teams. Two decades later, Brabham's youngest son, David, would briefly compete at the wheel of a Brabham during the 1990 world championship season, but the team had long since changed hands and Brabham Jr only managed to qualify six times before being replaced mid-way through the season.

Brabham Sr contributed articles to racing journals and wrote three books: Jack Brabham's Book of Motor Racing (1960), When the Flag Drops (1971) and The Jack Brabham Story (2004). He was knighted in 1979 and appointed AO in 2008.

His first marriage, to Betty Beresford, in 1951, ended in divorce in 1994. He is survived by his second wife, Margaret Taylor, whom he married in 1996, and three sons from his first marriage, Geoff, Gary and David.

• John Arthur Brabham, racing driver and designer, born 2 April 1926; died 19 May 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/may/19/jack-brabham-obituary-formula-one-racing

Otto Dix and German Art from World War One...

A detail from Otto Dix's Stormtroops Advancing Under a Gas Attack, from his 1924 set of first world war drawings, Der Kreig. 

The first world war in German art: Otto Dix's first-hand visions of horror
In 1914 Otto Dix joined the German army as a fierce patriot; two years later he was mowing down British soldiers at the Somme. Yet few artists did more to reveal the true horror of the first world war

Jonathan Jones
The Guardian

Wednesday 14 May 2014

In 1924 the German artist and war veteran Otto Dix looked back at the first world war on its 10th anniversary, just as we are doing on its 100th. What did he see? Today there is a fashion, in Britain, to celebrate the heroism of our grandfathers and their hard-won victory of 1914-1918. It's as if the clock is being turned back and the propaganda of the war believed all over again. Even the German war guilt clause written by the victors into the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 has been turned into "fact" – after all, who wants to trawl through the complex causes of this conflict and face the depressing truth that it ultimately happened because no one in July 1914 understood how destructive a modern industrial war could be?

We need to shake off the nostalgia of a centenary's forgetful pomp and look at the first world war through fresh eyes – German eyes. For no other artists saw this dreadful war as clearly as German artists did. While British war artists, for example, were portraying the generals, Germans saw the skull in no man's land.

Der Krieg, the series of prints Otto Dix published in 1924, and which isabout to go on view at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, is a startling vision of the apocalypse that really happened on Europe's soil 100 years ago.

A German soldier sits in a trench, resting against its muddy wall. He is smiling, but the grin is empty and hollow-eyed – for his face is a bare skull. He has been dead a while. No one bothered to bury him. His helmet is still on his skull, and his boots reveal a rotting ankle. In another print, a severed skull lies on the earth. Grass has grown on its crown. More grass resembles a moustache under its nose. Out of the eyes, vegetation bursts. Worms crawl sickeningly out of a gaping mouth.

Otto Dix's Skull, from his 1924 set of first world war drawings, Der Kreig

Dix had seen these things as a frontline soldier. At the time, he later confessed, he did not think about them too much. It was after he went home that the nightmares started. In what might now be called post-traumatic stress, he kept seeing the horrors of the trenches. He was compelled to show them, with nothing held back.

The prints gathered in Der Krieg (The War) are just part of the hideous outpouring of images he unleashed. It was as if Dix needed to vomit his memories in order to purge himself of all that haunted him. He engraved these black-and-white vignettes just after painting The Trench, a horrific masterpiece that distilled the western front into one grisly carnival of death. The painting was hugely controversial, and in 1937 the Nazis included it in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition that vilified modern German artists like Dix. The confiscated painting vanished during the second world war, perhaps burned in the bombing of Dresden.

Even with that loss, Dix's war art is a gut-wrenching act of witness. Yet he was not alone. He was part of a radical art movement that rejected the conflict and the European civilisation reponsible for it.

It was not at all obvious that a man such as Dix would create some of the defining pacifist images of the 20th century. In 1914 he was a fierce German patriot who joined up enthusiastically. He became a machine gunner and fought at the Battle of the Somme, efficiently mowing down British troops. He won the Iron Cross (second class) and began training to be a pilot. How did this courageous soldier turn into an anti-war artist?

To understand that, we need to comprehend that, during the first world war, a radical minority of Germans turned to artistic and political revolution, rather than nationalism. Like the British war poets, Germany's young artists came to hate the war, but unlike the poets, they organised to resist it.

Many simply could not take the front. Like Dix, the brilliant expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner joined up in 1914, but his mental health soon collapsed. In his 1915 painting Self-Portrait as a Soldier (currently in the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition The Great War in Portraits), he gives visual form to shell shock. The painter stands in uniform, his face yellow and eyes dazed, lurching like a sleepwalker, his right hand severed at the wrist

.

'Giving visual form to shell shock' … Ludwig Kirchner's Self Portrait As Soldier (1915). 

Kirchner had not really lost a hand. The bloody stump he waves is an image of artistic and sexual despair – war has unmanned him. Kirchner's pre-war paintings were sensual primeval nudes, but in his 1915 self-portrait he has turned helplessly from a naked model. It is not only a hand that has been amputated, but his very life force.

Like Dix and Kirchner, the poet Hugo Ball wanted to fight. He failed the medical three times. Visiting Belgium so he could at least see the front, he was so shocked that he turned against war, fled to Switzerland with his girlfriend, cabaret singer Emmy Hennings, and in 1916 founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. This was the birthplace of Dada, the most extreme art movement of the 20th century, which used nonsense, noise, cut-ups and chaos to repudiate war. "The beginning of Dada was really a reaction against mass murder in Europe," said Ball.

Dada was the counter-culture of the first world war, just as psychedelia was to be the counter-culture of Vietnam. At a time when supposedly rational decisions sent so many to their deaths – in 1916, the year Dada began, General Haig ordered an advance at the Somme that killed 19,000 British soldiers on a single day – Dada feigned madness. Its angriest practitioners were Germans.

Helmut Herzfeld wasn't so sure he wanted to be German, however. In 1916 he got so sick of the war's relentless propaganda that he changed his name to John Heartfield – a shockingly subversive adoption of the enemy's language. He got out of the army by pretending to be mad, and then, sent to work as a postman, threw away the mail to hinder Germany's war effort.

In 1919, at the First International Dada Art Fair in Berlin, Heartfield and another Dadaist, Rudolf Schlichter, hung a dummy of a German officer with a pig's face from the ceiling. It is impossible to think of Britain's generals being portrayed like this – but then Germany had lost, and Berlin was riven by revolution.

Dix also exhibited at the Dada fair. He got involved with this revolutionary movement after meeting its most charismatic exponent, George Grosz (much like Heartfield, he adopted the English "George" as a war protest). While Dix was at the front, Grosz was sending soldiers Dadaist "care packages" full of satirically useless stuff like neatly ironed white shirts.

George Grosz's Pillars of Society (1926)

At the 1919 fair Dix exhibited a painting of maimed war veterans begging on a Berlin pavement. The city was full of damaged men. In another of his Dada paintings, Card-Playing War Cripples, men breathe through tubes and use feet to hold cards – they are no longer men, they are collages.

For it took a new art to do justice to the Great War. So Dada invented photomontage, a shattered mirror of the violence done to bodies by war. At the Dada fair in Berlin this was made explicit when, over the broken bodies painted by Dix, a photomontage by Grosz of a man who seems horribly disfigured was inserted. This ruined face resembles photographs of the war's victims – until you realise the "Victim of Society" is nothing but an Arcimboldo head made of cut-out newspaper pictures.

German artists showed the war with utter clarity when others turned away. While the Dadaists were cutting up society, the war veteran Max Beckmann painted his grotesque vision of a world gone mad, Die Nacht (The Night). Yet their warnings went unheeded. In 1924 Dix's war engravings were shown in an anti-war exhibition. In less than a decade he would be living in internal exile, a banned "degenerate artist", while leaders with very different memories of the first world war laid the foundations of the second.

The truth survives. In his 1924 drawing How I Looked as a Soldier, Dix portrays himself holding his machine gun. He's unshaven under his helmet and his eyes are narrow slits. Dix the truth-teller looks back at Dix the killing machine.

• Otto Dix's Der Krieg prints are at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, 17 May-27 July.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/14/first-world-war-german-art-otto-dix

Nash the Slash RIP

Nash the Slash, Mysterious Canadian Experimental Musician, Dead at 66

Karen Bliss

13 May 2014

He was a mystery until the end who few knew by face.

Nash The Slash, the intriguing experimental rock musician who wrapped his head in gauze bandages and wore glasses, a top hat, bowtie and tuxedo — and who esteemed music crit Lester Bangs once declared “is the kind of opening act that makes the headliner work twice as hard” — has died at age 66

While exact details have yet to be released, his friend and frequent collaborator, surrealist painter Robert Vanderhorst, broke the news via social media.

Nash, whose real name was Jeff Plewman (he kept that hidden too for many years) was a multi-instrumentalist who toured with Gary Numan, Iggy Pop and opened for the Who and the Police in the 80s. He emerged on the Toronto scene in 1975 as a solo artist and joined the progressive-rock group FM in 1976 whose 1977 album, “Black Noise,” eventually went platinum. He left the band in 1978, but would join them again from 1983 until 1996, all the while working solo.

In 1998, he performed at Toronto’s Pride Week and continued to tour in Ontario. In 2008, he did a UK stint, which resulted in the limited-edited Live In London album and DVD. In 2010, he reunited onstage with Numan at the Opera House in Toronto. In an interview at that time Numan recalls coming to Toronto around 1979 and seeing Nash The Slash play by happenstance.

“I was so blown away by what he did, I did a really bad thing actually — I cancelled the support band that I had for the whole tour there and then, and got Nash to do it…it really made a difference to the tour. I think it really added something special to it.”

In 2012, Nash made a lengthy post on his web site, announcing he was “rolling up the bandages. The thrill is gone, it seems for more than B.B. King,” he began. “I'm proud of my remarkable 40-year career in the music biz with no hit (commercial) records. As an independent artist without management, major label support or any grants whatsoever (thank you Canada Council and Factor), I toured internationally and accomplished so much. I was unique on stage and on my recordings. I refused to be slick and artificial. I opened for and toured with some of the best musicians in the world, and was regarded highly by my peers….

“I created one of the first Canadian independent record labels (Cut-Throat Records) in order to release my music and merchandise to the public. I was the first Canadian musician to use a drum machine on an album (1978), at a time when drum machines were outlawed according to the bylaws of the Toronto Musicians' Association. I was the first to record an album, 'Decomposing', which was listen-able at any speed, and miraculously reviewed in Playboy magazine. I composed and produced music for film and television, and for multi-media exhibitions of the surrealist paintings by my friend Robert Vanderhorst…”

The retirement letter goes on to explain that live gigs don’t excite him anymore, his eccentric style/genre finds no place in today’s scene and the theft of music had devastated an important source of his income.

“Really sad to hear about Nash’s passing,” punk legend Joe Shithead of D.O.A. told Billboard in an email. “A few years back Nash and D.O.A. teamed up to play four shows together in Southern Ontario. D.O.A. would play a full set, then Nash would come on stage to join us for the encore. It was F-ing great!
 It gave a whole new twist to the songs having Nash’s incredible violin playing added in, and the looks on kid’s faces was pretty rich as well, it took them a minute but would get into it after about ½ a song. To me, having been a long time fan of Nash, it was a great honour. Nash The Slash, you will be missed! RIP my friend.”

“Everyone in the Toronto scene in the seventies knew Nash from his performances at The Original 99 Cent Roxy Theatre, run by Gary Topp — where he would perform the score to movies live — and then with his groundbreaking work in FM,” Cam Carpenter, who was doing marketing at the time for Quality Records, told Billboard.

“Larry Macrae at Quality Records signed Nash to solo deal in 1984 and we did the album of covers ‘American Band-Ages’ and later the re-formed FM album ‘Con-Test’ in 1985. We became friends during this era and I got to know the incredible man behind the bandages. He always played by his own rules and his legacy will continue to grow. A true original.”

One-time booking agent RJ Guha says Nash was on the roster of CPI-Brockum, repped by Mike Greggs, when he worked there in 1987-88. “I came up w an idea for him, Phantom of the Pop-era, with the image of the phantom mask in sunglasses and bandages. He loved it. Within a week, he had a 1,000 posters done with it and he skewered everyone he could for the next three years on the road.

“As a way to say thanks, he took me (and Greggs and Bill Seip) to a WWF show, 2nd row ringside — Ultimate Warrior and Macho Man. I had the time of my life and couldn’t believe the camera and lens Nash brought with him. At the very end, he literally leapt over the first row to get close up of a bleeding macho man with the belt... insane. Since then our paths crossed a fair bit when I had Matrix as an agency. Had lunch with him a few times at Stratengers, which was home base for him.”

Broadcast Hall of Famer David Marsden still plays FM and Nash The Slash on his current radio show at Oshawa’s CKGE FM. “I was originally introduced to him by David Pritchard, at CHUM FM, and he did many of the [CFNY’s] CASBY Awards and the Uno Awards. He appeared on those. He appeared at several of the Police Picnics for The Garys and we’d bump into each out and have a good time, laughing and scratching and carrying on and then we wouldn’t see each other for months. He was a very private man.

“I called him the Invisible Man simply because once he took off the bandages he would go out into the crowd at one of his own concerts and no body knew it was him.”

As Nash concluded on his web site farewell: “Creativity in all its facets should be inspirational, and as such should be absorbed, its subtleties appreciated, understood and then woven into the fabric of some other person's creative vision. I'm very pleased to have shared my creative endeavors with so many people around the world. I hope I've left a few breadcrumbs in the forest, to inspire others to find their own path.”

http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6084880/nash-the-slash-mysterious-canadian-experimental-musician-dead-at-66

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #252

New Bob Dylan track - Full Moon and Empty Arms

Was it ever thus?

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York: -

Love Song
Is It Only The Moonlight?
I Believe In You
Roll Another Number (For The Road)
Powderfinger

A solo spot, the first for many months, due to Ron Everly being on holiday. A quietish night due to The Rutles playing at Fibbers and the racegoing clowns being their usual boisterous selves, thankfully on the other side of town. Powderfinger was a first public performance for yours truely, based on the bootleg acoustic demo in E, not the recorded version in G: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrome_Dreams

HR Giger RIP

Alien designer HR Giger: 'I am afraid of my visions'
His human-machine fusions, with weapons, teeth, and occult symbols – a visual aesthetic at once unreal and recognisable – changed film monsters for ever. What more could we ask for?
 
Steve Rose
Wednesday 14 May 2014
theguardian.com

As Ian Holm tells the crew of the Nostromo before sputtering out of juice, the Alien is the "perfect organism". "It's structural perfection is matched only by its hostility … I admire its purity." He had a point. The creature in Alien and its many spin-offs was, and still is, one of the most genuinely alien things the movies have ever given us – the perfect movie monster.

Up to that point in 1979, screen horrors were still very much of this earth: psycho-killers, werewolves, spirits, sharks, that sort of thing. Suddenly, here was a creature both incomprehensible and relatable. It had a biological credibility, with its acid for blood and its bizarre, parasitic life cycle. It looked like an egg, then a sort-of crustacean, then, ultimately, one of us. Or a hideously deformed reflection of us, with its oversized head, its spindly limbs, its lack of eyes, its telescopic jaw. Like every great monster, Alien chimes with our deepest fears – death, sex, bodily violation, all iced over with the chill of the uncanny.

It took an out-there imagination to dream it up, and HR Giger was undoubtedly the man for the job. Apparently even other crew members were spooked on set by this softly spoken Swiss man, who dressed all in black and preferred to loiter, Dracula-like, in the shadows. There were rumours he kept the bones of his dead wife, Li Tobler, in his studio. They turned out to be untrue, though Giger was very much in touch with the dark side. As a child, he claims to have been beset by regular nightmares. Tobler, the model for many of his early works, had committed suicide in 1975, after an apparently tumultuous and bohemian marriage. That only fed further into his disturbing visions. Alien's co-writer Dan O'Bannon later recalled meeting Giger for the first time, in a Paris hotel. Giger offered him some opium. O'Bannon asked why he took it. "I am afraid of my visions," Giger replied. "It's just your mind," O'Bannon said. Giger responded: "That is what I am afraid of."

Before Alien, Giger primarily considered himself an artist. It was at an exhibition in Paris in the mid-1970s that he was spotted by another psychedelic visionary, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and co-opted into the movie industry. The story of Jodorowsky's unmade Dune project is the stuff of legend (and documentary – Frank Pavich made an entertaining film about it last year). Before it fell apart, Jodorowsky had assembled a host of talents including French comics scion Moebius, British sci-fi illustrator Chris Foss and writer/special effects Dan O'Bannon. Not to mention a cast including Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson and Salvador Dalí.

It was O'Bannon who brought Giger on to Ridley Scott's movie, and the rest is movie history, but Giger's commercial success all but destroyed his credentials as a fine artist. By the 1970s, he had established an aesthetic he never deviated from: disturbing, obscene fusions of machine-like parts, women's bodies, skulls, bones, weapons, teeth, tentacles, occult symbology. Not a particularly novel iconography, you could say, but it was really about the execution. He's often associated with surrealists such as Dalí or doomy symbolists like Arnold Böcklin (Giger once did a homage to Böcklin's famous Isle of the Dead), but Giger's precisely detailed, airbrushed, colour-leached style was all of its own, bringing to mind ancient temple carvings, the elegant lines of art nouveau, and modern technical drawings.

Giger's imprint can be seen in countless subsequent attempts to imagine aliens and alien worlds, but the movies have yet to come up with anything as bracingly terrifying as Alien. His iconography has also been adopted wholesale by gothic subculture, which has diminished its impact somewhat. Rather than the dark reaches of the human psyche, Giger's imagery is now more likely to bring to mind tattoo parlours, fetish clubs and 1990s cyberpunk. In his later career, his work also devolved into semi-pornographic self-parody, it must be said. But having created an aesthetic unique enough to earn its own adjective, it would be unfair to demand more of Giger. He's done plenty enough. He seems to have genuinely gazed into the abyss. What he brought back was mercifully filtered through a refined visual sensibility. "Sometimes people only see horrible, terrible things in my paintings," Giger once said. "I tell them to look again, and they may see two elements in my paintings – the horrible things and the nice things."

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/14/hr-giger-film-artist-alien-i-am-afraid-of-my-visions

Obituary -  http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/13/hr-giger