Journaux Des Fétichismes

A boundary breaker, a true artist, David Bowie's presence filled up the world with magical glitter dust.  Everyone loved Bowie because you knew if it was alright for him to be David Bowie, it was just fine to be your true self.  He represented everything loving, accepting and different about the world..now it all just feels so empty... © Thuany Gabriela/Flickr I've never been the sort of person who mourns after the deceased. No matter how close they were to me or my family. I am among those who are most free from this emotion. It usually resulted in utter shock. This was mainly because the force of extreme sadness inevitably stunned the whole of my soul, impeding its freedom of action. It happens to us when we are suddenly struck with alarm by some extremely bad news; as one of the writers most dear to me, Michel de Montaigne would put it,  "we are enraptured, paralysed in all our movements in such a way that, afterwards, when the soul lets itself go with lam...

Autumn Evening, 1895 *** Like other species, artists club together in movements not just for purposes of identification but for longevity. Individuals who don’t belong to schools take longer establishing reputations during their lifetimes, and tend to lose them sooner after their deaths. Henri Le Sidaner (1862–1939) was one such individual: a contemporary of the Post-Impressionists who painted in dots but was not a Pointillist; revelled in complementary colours but was not a Fauve; and drew a veil of dreams over reality but was not a Symbolist, or only briefly. He was, as his friend the critic Gabriel Mourey described him, ‘a sort of mystic who has no faith’. When asked what school he belonged to, his own reply was: ‘None. But if you absolutely insist on categorising me, I am an intimist.’ If you’ve never heard of Le Sidaner, this may be why. But now the artist posthumously dismissed by the great Post-Impressionist scholar John Rewald as a fabricator of ‘post office cale...