A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Salomé (1991) by Ernst Fuchs. Colour etching and aquatint.
The art of the great Ernst Fuchs owes much to his Symbolist forebears so finding this isn’t exactly a surprise. In a similar style there’s Nixe (1991), both prints being for sale at this gallery site.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive
Drawings from an edition of Alfred Tennyson’s Poems illustrated by British artist Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872–1945) which was published by George Bell & Sons in 1905. The book was part of a series of illustrated poetry collections that included several books featured here in previous posts: Poems by John Keats and Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley both illustrated by Robert Anning Bell, and The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe illustrated by William Heath Robinson. There was also an edition of Browning illustrated by Byam Shaw at whose art school Ms Fortescue-Brickdale was employed as a teacher. Her Tennyson drawings aren’t entirely to my taste, I’ve omitted the full-page works which are rather static pre-Raphaelite-derived things. Far better are these vignettes whose heavy outlines and sinuous curves resemble both Heath Robinson’s early illustrations and Pamela Coleman Smith‘s famous Tarot card designs. As usual the Internet Archive has the whole book and (should anyone require more Tennyson) Ms Fortescue-Brickdale’s take on that Victorian staple Idylls of the King.
Continue reading “Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s illustrated Tennyson”
The Fox (1968). Design by Bill Gold, art by Leo & Diane Dillon.
Mark Rydell’s The Fox may be regarded unfavourably now for its retrograde idea of a lesbian relationship but that’s still a great poster by the Dillons. Equally retrograde (well it was 1957) is Anders als du und ich, a film about wayward German youth directed by ex-Nazi propagandist Veit Harlan:
Klaus is a young man in post-war Berlin. He is drawn to his friend Manfred and, under the encouragement of their acquaintance, Dr. Winkler, explores the underground world of gay clubs and electronic music. His family begins to learn of his other life and do everything they can to set him straight.
A saving grace is the conspicuous deployment of Oskar Sala’s Trautonium. They’re deviants—of course they like weird electronic music! Sala’s instrument was his own invention which means it has a unique pre-Moog sound, famously used by Alfred Hitchcock in the score for The Birds. YouTube has a collection of the electronica moments from Anders als du und ich. Wait for the wrestling scene…
• Netherwood: Last Resort of Aleister Crowley by A Gentleman of Hastings. Related: Jimmy Page’s Lucifer Rising sessions part 1 and part 2.
• “This coming 16 June, [BBC] Radio 4 will be a wall-to-wall Joycefest, kicking off at 9am and running until midnight.”
• A World Where Architecture is the Driving Force Behind Society, Core77 on the Cités Obscures of François Schuiten.
• At The Hooded Utilitarian an examination of the thorny problem of adapting Lovecraft for the comics medium.
• Plates from La Plante et ses Applications Ornementales (1897–1900) by Eugene Grasset.
• Coilhouse found a rough copy of Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.
• Three Quick Ways to Introduce Yourself to the Work of Harlan Ellison.
• Daniel Buren’s Monumenta 2012 at the Grand Palais, Paris.
• Our Sorrows, a new video from Julia Holter.
• I, Cyclops: Monocularity in a 3-D World.
• JG Ballard: The Concordance.
• RIP Pete Cosey.
• Pete Cosey with Miles Davis et al, November 1973: Ife | Turnaroundphrase
The post title sounds like a psychedelic album but the illustrations are from The Garden of Kama (1901), allegedly a collection of Indian love poems “translated by Laurence Hope”. The translator’s real name was Adela Florence Nicolson who no doubt wished to do for India what Edward Fitzgerald had done for Persia but rather than presenting new translations of unknown verse the poems were all her own work. The book survived this mild scandal to be republished several times, the illustrations here by Byam Shaw (1872–1919) being from a 1914 edition. I linked to a selection of these plates last year when they were posted at Golden Age Comic Book Stories but anyone wanting to see the complete book, poems and all, may do so at the Internet Archive.
The content may be Orientalist pastiche but Shaw paid great attention to the decorative details. This is also an adult work, with violence, death and some sexy females. So many illustrated books of this period are children’s stories it can be a surprise to find something where the characters don’t live happily ever after.
The idle question “Where can you find the best reproduction of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I?” was answered at the Google Art Project where there are four different prints to examine. As usual it seems churlish to complain but I would have preferred one decent copy and a few more Dürer engravings in place of the duplicates; his Knight, Death and the Devil, for example, is absent. There are several other engravings, however, all of whose minute details and shading benefit from close scrutiny. Dürer is well-represented compared to other artists, there are several paintings there as well. The only oddity is the inclusion of this drawing of three witches by Dürer’s pupil Hans Baldung Grien. The museum that owns the drawing credits Grien but a search isn’t really necessary when it’s signed with the artist’s “HBG” monogram in place of Dürer’s famous “AD”. Does Google have any art historians proofing these entries or is it solely the work of technicians copying and pasting information?
