Emanuele Taglietti painted some 500 covers for various fumetti or Italian comics during the 1970s. His work featured on such best-selling adult sex and horror fumetti like Sukia, Zora the Vampire, Stregoneria, Ulula, Vampirissimo and Wallestein, among many others. At one point he was producing ten paintings a month for these titles.

Taglietti’s sex and horror paintings often featured recognizable charcters/actors from popular horror movies like Christopher Lee’s Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, The Plague of the Zombies, and Creature from the Black Lagoon. According to Horropedia, Taglietti had “a fixation” with the actress Ornella Muti on whose likeness he based the character Sukia.

Born in Ferrara, Italy, in 1943, Taglietti was the son of a set designer who worked with film directors like Michelangelo Antonioni—who was also apparently his cousin. His father regularly took the young Taglietti on to movie sets introducing him to directors, actors, and crew.

Deciding to follow his father into the film business, Taglietti attended art college where he studied design. He graduated and then enrolled at film school in Rome. He became an assistant director working with directors like Federico Fellini and Dino Risi. But this wasn’t enough for the young Taglietti. By the 1970s, he switched careers to become an illustrator for the incredibly popular sex and horror fumetti.

Taglietti signed up with Edifumetto, where he worked at designing and painting covers. His style was influenced by the artists Frank Frazetta and Averardo Ciriello. His paintings successfully managed to convey thrilling narrative with highly alluring and erotically charged action. By the 1980s, fumetti were no longer as popular. Taglietti moved onto painting and teaching. He retired in 2000 but continues to paint.

A beautiful must-have book of Taglietti’s work called Sex and Horror was published in 2015. It’s one that is well worth seeking out.
 

 

 
See more of Taglietti’s delightfully lurid artwork, after the jump…

 
No one does horror like the Italians, and it’s a tradition that goes back a long while. Check out this 1936 masterpiece of gore, Il caso Valdemar—it’s just riveting. Surprisingly, the two directors (Gianni Hoepli and Ubaldo Magnaghi) have virtually no additional credits at IMDB, leaving one to assume they were amateurs? The acting is superb and the cinematography is incredibly stylized and sophisticated, with tight, disorienting shots at odd angles, reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The main attraction though, is the disgusting final scene, an incredible early special effect.

Il caso Valdemar is actually an adaptation of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” an 1845 short story by Edgar Allan Poe. In an incredibly devious move, Poe presented the story as true, and let people believe it actually happened for a while before finally admitting his hoax. In the story, Ernest Valdemar is dying of tuberculosis. He requests that his friend (the narrator, a mesmerist), mesmerize him on his deathbed. Valdemar is put into a trance by the narrator and announces his own death. For seven months, Valdemar lie dead, but preserved. The narrator eventually wakes his tormented subject, and Valdemar decomposes at a rapid rate.
 

 
Bruno Bozzetto’s Allegro Non Troppo (“Fast, not too fast”) is a full-length animated parody of Fantasia made in Italy in 1976, so you should probably let that sink in for a minute. Debussy, Vivaldi, Stravinsky and others are the soundtrack for a series of snarky cartoon vignettes that frankly, give Disney a run for its (vast sums of) money. My personal favorite segment however is Ravel’s Boléro, which chronicles the birth of life from the primordial stew of a Coca-Cola bottle, tossed out by a careless spaceman.

What follows is a perfect compliment to the rich swell of Boléro. Creatures grow and change and shift into multitudes, marching across a shifting landscape with a graceful sense of purpose. Eventually of course, man is born, and the vast diversity of life is crushed by the vulgar descendants of apes and their brutal cities. There’s a tragicomic fatalism to the whole parade that is never observed by the progenitor astronauts, who are probably off somewhere else, casually littering ultimately doomed cradles of life onto other faraway planets like intergalactic Johnny Appleseeds.
 

 
Before you get your knickers in a twist and deliver unto me your undergrad thesis on the subjectivity of beauty, rest assured—this furniture is supposed to be ugly, or rather it is intended to be “post-ugly.” The abominations you see here are from a new book, 1968: Radical Italian Furniture, and it’s a mind-bendingly vibrant tour through the late 60’s Italian avant-garde. This is a design movement in which concepts such as “good design” and ‘taste” were actively spurned.

In addition to the jarring aesthetics of Italian Radical Design, you may notice that a lot of what you see here barely resembles anything we might recognize as “furniture,” and what does appears to be completely incompatible with the domestic spaces of actual people—it’s all better understood in the context of art, rather than of utility. If you’re wondering what museum is charged with curating such a hypnotic, aesthetically unholy, fundamentally impractical collection of furniture, you need look no further than those steadfast guardians of the fugly, those perpetual patrons of the hallowed and hideous—the insanely rich. Every piece you see here is owned by a man named Dakis Joannou,a Greek septugenarian billlionaire who has managed to remain unscathed by his country’s economic crisis.

Imagine that.
 

 
Besides his filthy riches, Dakis Joannou is known for two things—his enormous private collection of contemporary art and furniture, and his possession of the ugliest fucking boat in the universe. The “mega-yacht,” over 39 meters long, is christened “Guilty,” and its design is inspired by World War One era British Naval camouflage. (Perhaps Joannou is worried some one might try to blow him out of the water?) Curiously, if you look at Guilty from above, you’ll see a giant picture of Iggy Pop—not the artist that usually comes to mind when one hears the phrase, “yacht rock.”

Guilty was co-designed by some Italian yacht designer and contemporary artist Jeff Koons. Koons and Joannou have maintained a relationship since the mid-80s, when the yachting enthusiast purchased Koons’ Total Equilibrium Tank for for $2,700. The piece, by the way, is three basketballs in an aquarium. No word if there are any Koons originals stowing away aboard Guilty, but the main deck “living room” is decorated in (you guessed it), Italian Radical Design.
 

 
Shockingly, Joannou has received some criticism from his countrymen, who believe he’s more interested in being an art collector than actually supporting the arts, especially in his native Greece. Despite the tragic state of the Greek economy, Joannou stands by a mission statement that conveniently absolves him from any funding responsibilities, saying:

“Support isn’t helping anybody. In the beginning, a lot of people thought that’s what I was doing, and they would ask for funding for this or that. I said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not into that.’ It’s about creating a platform.”

 

 
I wouldn’t worry though—Joannou assures us he is helping in other ways. For example, two years ago he put on a show entitled, “Animal Spirits,” a reference to the theories of “soft capitalist” economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes believed that a man’s “animal spirit” compromises his rationality, that much of what we do is motivated by “spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations.”  Oh, and the show featured Joannou’s own shitty drawings. From the mission statement:

The economic crisis faced by the world today is not only extensive and multifaceted, but its implications for our future are profound. “Animal Spirits,” the collection of drawings from the Dakis Joannou Drawing Collection presented in the Hydra Slaughterhouse, is intended to invoke comment and trigger reflection on our current global dilemma.

 

 
It goes on to say that the exhibit intends to “[provoke] acknowledgment of the looming international crisis,” leaving one to imagine how easy it must be to avoid political provocation whilst captaining the world’s ugliest fucking yacht.. The Italian Radical collection is not to my taste (to say the least), but it’s weird and exciting and dangerous, and any retching it might inspire doesn’t diminish its artistic and historical significance. It may be a little more difficult to “expropriate the expropriators” when they’re bobbing on a lurid, nautical Versailles, but I think we can still do it.

Come on comrades, let’s commandeer the Guilty—for art, for justice, and for ugly, uncomfortable chairs!
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Via yatzer