British Book Illustration – Yesterday and To-day

illustrators01.jpg

The “to-day” in the title is a sign that this volume dates from the years before the Second World War when the hyphenated “today” was still a common sight. British Book Illustration – Yesterday and To-day was published in 1923, one of many such books produced by The Studio magazine. Studio editor Geoffrey Holme is also credited as editor of the book which follows the history of British illustration from Thomas Bewick, in 1795, to Randolph Schwabe in 1923, with each artist being represented by one or two pieces considered to exemplify their work. (Harry Clarke, who appears near the end, was Irish but the newly-minted Irish Free State was only a year old at this time so Clarke had technically been a Briton for most of his life.) Being a Studio publication, each illustration includes a note of the medium used (pen, wood engraving, etc), something you don’t always see in books of this kind. A lengthy introductory essay by Malcolm C. Salaman examines the work of each artist in turn. Two hundred pages isn’t anything like enough to do justice to the subject, and I could quibble over many of the selections, as well as the omissions. But the book is worthwhile for some of its unusual choices as well as showing drawings by artists who weren’t as well known as Beardsley and company. Among the unusual selections is the original drawing for The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar that Harry Clarke produced for his Poe collection. This was rejected by Harrap for being too horrible even though it accurately depicts the moments from the end of the story. The drawing is much more detailed than the one that replaced it but you don’t see the first version reproduced very often. Looking at it again it occurs to me that it really ought to be included in future editions of Clarke’s Poe illustrations.

illustrators02.jpg

illustrators03.jpg

illustrators04.jpg

illustrators05.jpg

Continue reading “British Book Illustration – Yesterday and To-day”

Weekend links 749

carriage.jpg

Fantastic Sea Carriage (1556) by Johannes van Doetecum the Elder & Lucas van Doetecum, after Cornelis Floris the Younger.

• “Preiss and McElheny have acknowledged the influence of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941), which offers a brilliant, brain-scratching disquisition on bibliotecas as conduits both of infinity and meaninglessness. I also found myself thinking of Arthur Fournier, in D. W. Young’s documentary The Booksellers (2019), who spoke of ‘the psychic dreaming that paper allows.'” Sukhdev Sandhu on The Secret World, a film by Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny about the books collected by Christine Burgin.

• Most people know Burt Shonberg’s paintings—if they know them at all—from their appearance in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films. But Shonberg had a career outside the cinema, something explored in Momentary Blasts of Unexpected Light: The Visionary Art of Burt Shonberg, an exhibition currently running at the The Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles.

Warriors (1996), an ad for Murphy’s Irish Stout directed by the Quay Brothers. Samurai warriors in an Irish pub scored to the theme from Yojimbo.

The Grand Jeu group have been neglected, at least in English-speaking history, from the general consciousness of “Surrealism” but they remain among its most interesting dissidents. The teenage Simplistes, led by [René] Daumal and [Roger] Gilbert-Lecompte, collectively experimented with consciousness and investigated wildly syncretic modes of destroying and recombining selves: diverse hermetic and occult systems, extrasensory perception, trances and somnambulism, mediumistic practice and collective dreaming.

[…]

The Grand Jeu was a project of paradox: artistic and ascetic, indulgent and severe, political, and mystical, ecstatic and negating, egoistic and selfless, graceful and violent. It sought to continually weave between collectivity and individuality, of art and life, multiplicity and unity, fed by a brew of political radicalism, inspired by Rimbaud’s germinal poetics of revolt and illumination, a utilitarian embrace of occult traditions and ideas, drug experimentation, Hindu sacred texts (Daumal would become an expert in Sanskrit) and some of Bergson’s philosophy. They were, in their own words, “serious players.” It was a mad mix, and in retrospect, clearly doomed to a short life—so, it turned out, were most its members.

Gus Mitchell on the “experimental metaphysics” of the Grand Jeu

• At Smithsonian magazine: Lanta Davis and Vince Reighard on the sculpted monsters and grotteschi that fill the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo, Italy.

• At Bandcamp: George Grella compiles a list of “spooky sounds and spooky music, things to haunt nights and dreams”.

• At Colossal: Kelli Anderson’s amazing pop-up book, Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape.

• “The play that changed my life: Jim Broadbent on Ken Campbell’s electrifying epic Illuminatus!

• DJ Food browses some of the many album covers designed by the versatile Robert Lockhart.

Winners of the 2024 Nikon Photomicrography Competition.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 873 by Andy Graham.

• The Strange World of…Lou Reed.

• The Internet Archive is back!

Warriors (1990) by Jon Hassell | Red Warrior (1990) by Ronald Shannon Jackson | Bhimpalasi Warriors (2001) by Transglobal Underground

Robert Lawson’s House of Usher

lawson1.jpg

Spook Month starts tomorrow so it no longer feels too early to post this marvellous (undated) etching of the opening scene from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. Robert Lawson (1892–1957) was an American author and illustrator whose early etchings were featured here some years ago after I turned up another wonderfully atmospheric piece depicting galleons rotting in the weed-tangled waste of the Sargasso Sea. I’m pleased that this gallery page which shows many more Lawson prints is still active over a decade later; they don’t have the Poe etching, however. A few copies may be found on the big auction sites but the best ones are blighted with a watermark.

lawson2.jpg

Preparatory pencil drawing.

The title of Poe’s story refers to two separate falls, the dissolution of the Usher family line, and the physical collapse of the house in which Roderick and Madeline Usher pass their days, a calamity augured by the crack in the masonry which the narrator sees when he arrives at the shore of the black tarn. Lawson pays close attention to all the relevant details which Poe’s narrator is unable to regard as offering a sublime spectacle, something that film-makers and other illustrators (when they depict the house at all) don’t always honour:

I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?

Unless there’s more like this from Lawson the only other print of his that approaches horror is the Sargasso one; everything else is historical scenes or the light fantasy he continued to draw in his subsequent career as an illustrator of children’s books.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Edmund Dulac’s illustrated Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928
The Purloined Eidolon
Martin van Maële’s illustrated Poe
Mask of the Red Death, 1969
Narraciones extraordinarias by Edgar Allan Poe
Fritz Eichenberg’s illustrated Poe
The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrated Poe
Burt Shonberg’s Poe paintings
Illustrating Poe #5: Among the others
Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty
Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke
Illustrating Poe #2: William Heath Robinson
Illustrating Poe #1: Aubrey Beardsley
Poe at 200
The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA
William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

First Papers of Surrealism, 1942

surrealisme.jpg

As I was saying a couple of weeks ago, Surrealism will be 100 years old this year, if you mark the movement’s birth from the first manifestoes (there were two different ones) published in October 1924. Surrealism doesn’t really have a definite beginning, however, either in 1924 or earlier on; the movement evolved over several years, with different factions competing for followers while squabbling over intentions. After a great deal of ferment the manifestoes from the opposed groups led by Yvan Goll and André Breton were a declaration that something substantial had been happening that required definition. I’m not sure why all of this interests me as much as it does just now, but I’m looking forward to seeing where the interest leads. Don’t be surprised to see more posts on the subject in the coming months.

firstpapers1.jpg

So, then… Fast-forward to 1942 and First Papers of Surrealism, an exhibition of paintings staged in New York City by the Coordination Council of French Relief Societies in October of that year. The exhibition was curated by André Breton with the assistance of Marcel Duchamp, Breton having recently arrived in the United States after escaping from Nazi-occupied France together with a small group of Surrealist artists, some of whom were represented in the show. Duchamp’s main contribution was His Twine, an installation of a large quantity of string threaded around the exhibition space through which the visitors had to peer in order to see the paintings. Duchamp also invited a group of children to play ball games inside the gallery on the opening night. This wasn’t the first Surrealist exhibition to be held in New York—Julien Levy had introduced the city to the latest art movement at his own gallery in 1933, and had been showing Surrealist paintings and Joseph Cornell’s artworks in the years that followed—but First Papers on Surrealism was an important event, with many major artists represented.

firstpapers2.jpg

What you see here are pages from the exhibition catalogue, a publication which is more like one of the smaller Surrealist magazines than a mere list of the pictures on display. Marcel Duchamp designed the die-cut cover (those holes make me wonder whether these were also originally threaded with string), while the catalogue interior contains an intriguing collection of quotes, captions, photographs and illustrations. Breton’s “Great Transparent Ones” raise their invisible heads again, while the artists and curators are all depicted in a series of “compensation portraits” which stand in for an absence of suitable photos.

Continue reading “First Papers of Surrealism, 1942”

Weekend links 690

sosnowski.jpg

The Voice of St. Teresa (1928) by Oskar Sosnowski.

• The House is the Monster: Roger Corman’s Poe Cycle forms “a body of work not only deeply coherent but uniquely inspired,” says Geoffrey O’Brien.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Amberwood, while at The Daily Heller there’s a profile of Otto Bettmann, “an unsung visionary of commercial art”.

• At Public Domain review: The Works of Mars (1671), plans for military architecture by Allain Manesson Mallet.

The “underlying oneness of all things,” the conviction “that everything is connected” (Gravity’s Rainbow 703), is a thesis that appeals to many mystics and even to some scientists, but Fort complains that the latter too quickly dismiss unexplainable coincidences, or feebly explain them away. Scorning “scientific procedure” and inept police investigations, Fort turns for answers to denizens of the occult—poltergeists, invisible people, vampires, werewolves, miracle healers, fakirs, psychic criminals, dowsers—and to such notions as teleportation, human-animal metamorphoses, spontaneous combustion and pyrokinesis, “psychic bombardment,” telekinesis, animism, “secret rays,” telepathy, spirit-photography, clairvoyance, and modern instances of witchcraft.

Steven Moore in a perceptive essay about the overlooked connections between Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Charles Fort. Having discussed Fort’s preoccupation with coincidences, the author notes that he shares a name with the late Steve Moore, former editor of Fortean Times magazine

• Pynchonesque headline of the week: The Paradox of the Radioactive Boars.

James Balmont’s guide to the masterworks of New Taiwanese Cinema.

• New music: Solo for Tamburium by Catherine Christer Hennix.

Winners of Bird Photographer of the Year 2023.

Idris Ackamoor’s favourite music.

Radio-Active (1984) by Steps Ahead | Radioactivity (William Orbit Remix) (1991) by Kraftwerk | Radioactivity (1998) by Hikasu