{ feuilleton }

This battered item is my copy of the V&A guide to the landmark Aubrey Beardsley exhibition held at the museum from May to September 1966. That exhibition introduced Beardsley to a new public and made his work very trendy for a while, helped by the Beardsley-styled sleeve of the Beatles’ Revolver album which was released [...]

Alla Nazimova as Salomé (1923).
I wrote a while ago about Alla Nazimova’s luscious silent film production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, a suitably Decadent affair with an allegedly all-gay cast, and costume and stage design based on Aubrey Beardsley’s celebrated illustrations. The film is currently touring England and Wales with a new score for four musicians [...]

Both issues of Wyndham Lewis’s avant garde art and literature journal can be found in a collection of similar publications from the Modernist years here. I’ve always liked the bold graphics of Lewis and his fellow Vorticists, and BLAST 2, “the War Number”, is especially good in that regard. The MJP site reminds us that [...]

Back in February I posted some pictures from a 1971 collection of Art Nouveau illustration and design, some of which were competition entries from The Studio magazine. The Studio, which later became the long-running Studio International, can be seen from issue 11 onwards at Archive.org now that they’ve started uploading Google’s book scans. I’ve only [...]

Thus the judgement of a reviewer examining Aubrey Beardsley’s work in The Graphic for May 23, 1896. The work in question was Beardsley’s Rape of the Lock illustrations being unveiled for the first time in the second number of The Savoy, the magazine which Beardsley co-founded with Arthur Symons and Leonard Smithers as a rival [...]

Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros.

“The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He [...]

left: No title or date; right: Joker from a playing card set (1924).
A recent post by Silent-Porn-Star draws my attention to Swedish illustrator and cartoonist Einar Nerman (1888–1983) whose work I don’t recall having come across before. There isn’t much available to see online unfortunately, a shame as SPS’s posting of a 1926 cigarette ad [...]

The cover picture of yesterday’s book purchase complements the month, being a woodcut by Leopold Stolba entitled February from a Ver Sacrum calendar for 1903. The book is Art Nouveau: Posters and Designs (1971), a collection edited by Andrew Melvin for the Academy Art Editions series and the book includes some covers for Jugend magazine [...]

Kiss of Death (2007).
From a series of marvellous homoerotic ink drawings by Kenya Shimizu. The artist seems to have no web presence at all, unfortunately, aside from three pages of work for sale at London’s Adonis Art Gallery. Most of the pictures there are hardcore images so if you don’t want to see any of [...]

Dilettantes by You Am I (2008). Illustration and design by Ken Taylor.
Dilettantes is the eighth studio album from Australian band You Am I which is released this week sporting a very creditable Beardsley pastiche by illustrator Ken Taylor. Sleevage has more details about the creation of the CD package, including preliminary sketches. Those familiar with [...]

Nova Venus (1938).
I doubt that illustrator Mahlon Blaine featured in any of the scurrilous porn books in Franz Kafka’s collection—he would have been too young, for a start—but his erotic work isn’t so far removed from some of the artists of The Amethyst and Opals. As usual with obscure talents of this period it’s good [...]

Pages from Der Amethyst (1906).
Okay, don’t get too excited, I simply wanted to make a couple of points of order while this story is still causing a stir. I noted earlier the recent (London) Times piece about James Hawes’ new book, Excavating Kafka, described as a work which:
seeks to explode important myths surrounding the [...]

Aubrey Beardsley photographed by Frederick Evans (1894).
I’ve been going through the Coulthart VHS library recently, transferring to DVD recordings which can’t be purchased or found online. Among these is a drama from the BBC’s Playhouse strand, Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert, broadcast in 1982. This follows the life of artist Aubrey Beardsley from the [...]

The House of Souls (1923). 
Well, a handful anyway. The late RT Gault put a page of Machen cover scans on his book site which also included the excellent Absolute Elsewhere catalogue of “Fantastic, Visionary, and Esoteric Literature in the 1960s and 1970s”. The cover for The House of Souls is a very odd piece by [...]

I wasn’t planning on featuring W Heath Robinson again so soon but I couldn’t resist posting some extracts from his 1914 edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, another great PDF download from the scanned books at Archive.org. I have a few of these illustrations in a WHR monograph but I didn’t realise the book as [...]

Random browsing this week turned up some nice high-res photos of Harmony in Blue and Gold, as James Abbott McNeill Whistler named the room he decorated for Frederick R. Leyland in 1878. Leyland had bought one of Whistler’s paintings, La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1864), and architect Thomas Jeckyll was concerned that the [...]

Another Archive.org discovery, this is a PDF copy of one of Austin Spare’s first illustrated works. Behind the Veil was a small book of mystical fiction by Ethel Rolt Wheeler, published in 1906. Spare was only 20 at the time and the drawings, while accomplished, lack the finesse of his later work. They also owe [...]

So the first book purchase of the year turns out to be the original Dover edition of Beardsley and Wilde’s Salomé. This appeared in 1967, a year after the major V&A exhibition which introduced Beardsley’s work to a new generation and commenced the Beardsley craze that lasted into the Seventies. Not that I’m in desperate [...]

“Everything about her was white.” Illustration by Edmund Dulac for
The Dreamer of Dreams by Queen Marie of Roumania (1915).
A major exhibition of British fantasy illustration opens at the Dulwich Picture Gallery this Wednesday, running to February 17th, 2008. Considering the huge resurgence of popularity in fantasy for children I’m surprised none of the UK galleries [...]

Aubrey Beardsley illustrates Catullus for The Savoy, no. 7 (1896).
Farewell then, Mister Aitch, now he’s decided to call it a day at the wonderful and unique Giornale Nuovo. He’d been blogging (must we call it that? It seems we must…) for five years which probably makes him first generation in the concentrated timescale of web-existence. [...]