Jacques Houplain’s Maldoror

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This is more like it. In 2008 when I posted one of Jacques Houplain’s etchings for a 1947 edition of Les Chants de Maldoror there were none of the other pictures in the series to be found. Now there’s a website devoted to Houplain’s work which features a page of his Maldoror illustrations. There’s a crude vigour to these pieces that gets much closer to Lautréamont’s fervour and viciousness than do the illustrations by Houplain’s famous contemporaries. Houplain is also one of the few illustrators to pay some attention to Lautréamont’s frequent digressions into the animal kingdom. The artist’s other work is worth a look; Legendes is a series of prints of medieval demons.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The etching and engraving archive
The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Hans Bellmer’s Maldoror
Les Chants de Maldoror by Shuji Terayama
Polypodes
Ulysses versus Maldoror
Maldoror
Books of blood
Magritte’s Maldoror
Frans De Geetere’s illustrated Maldoror
Maldoror illustrated

2 thoughts on “Jacques Houplain’s Maldoror”

  1. Have you heard the Mike Patton and Masami Akita record as Maldoror-She? Excellent stuff. It was actually what got me into the book. And hats off for your continued, the superlative work. I glom onto something great with regular frequency here. The Symbolist stuff in particular.

  2. Thanks, and no, I’ve not heard the Patton and Akita record. There’s quite a few Maldoror-related recordings, enough to make a post of their own. A few years ago I designed a CD for Steve Severin, one of his soundtracks for stage performances. He’d also done one for a theatre version of Maldoror. To date that’s the only one I’ve heard.

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