Fidus – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 130

Sarah and Writhing Octopus (New Wave Series, 1992) by Masami Teraoka.

Strange Flowers continues to push all my buttons. For a while now I’d been intent on writing something about the strange (unbuilt) temples designed by German artist/obsessive naturist Fidus (Hugo Höppener) but I reckon James has done a better job than I would have managed. Also last week he wrote about Schloss Schleißheim, a palatial estate outside Munich with connections to Last Year in Marienbad and another eccentric, pseudonymous German artist: Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt).

• The circus poster that inspired John Lennon’s Sgt. Pepper song Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite! has been reproduced as a limited edition letterpress print. Related: Wikipedia’s page about Pablo Fanque (1796–1871), “the first black circus proprietor in Britain”.

• The first two volumes of The Graphic Canon, both edited by Russ Kick, are reviewed at Literary Kicks. I’ve not seen either of these yet but volume 2 contains my interpretation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Related: the second book previewed at Brain Pickings.

You only have to read [Alan Bennett’s] diaries to see that, underneath the wit and humour and sandwich-filled pottering around old churches, there is a deep resentment at what has happened to England in his lifetime and an instinctive distrust, sometimes amounting to deep loathing, of most politicians. Listening, for instance, to Alan Clark and Kenneth Clarke talking on the radio about the arrest of General Pinochet in 1998, he writes: “Both have that built-in shrug characteristic of 80s Conservatism, electrodes on the testicles a small price to pay when economic recovery’s at stake.”

Michael Billington on Alan Bennett: a quiet radical

• Hauntologists mine the past for music’s future: Mark Pilkington draws a Venn diagram encompassing Coil, Broadcast, the Ghost Box label, Arthur Machen, MR James, Nigel Kneale, Iain Sinclair and others.

• Hell Is a City: the making of a cult classic – in pictures. The mean streets of Manchester given the thriller treatment by Hammer Films in 1959. The film is released on DVD this month.

• The Function Room: The Kollection, Matt Leyshon’s debut volume of horror stories, has just been published. The cover painting is one of my pieces from the 1990s.

• New Worlds magazine (now apparently known as “Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds“) has been relaunched online.

A drawing from Anatomy (part 1), a series by Alex Konahin.

• The forthcoming Scott Walker album, Bish Bosch, will be released on December 3rd. 4AD has a trailer.

• Cormac McCarthy Cuts to the Bone: Noah Gallagher Shannon on the early drafts of Blood Meridian.

• The Velvet Underground of English Letters: Simon Sellars Discusses JG Ballard.

• Michelle Dean on The Comfort of Bad Books.

• The typewriter repairers of Los Angeles

• Cats With Famous People

• Marienbad (1987) by Sonoko | Komm Nach Marienbad (2011) by Marienbad | Marienbad (2012) by Julia Holter.

(Thanks to Ian and Pedro for this week’s picture links!)

Die Entwicklung der modernen Buchkunst in Deutschland

Thanks are due again to Mr Peacay at BibliOdyssey for drawing attention to this recent addition to the Internet Archive from the Smithsonian collection. Die Entwicklung der modernen Buchkunst in Deutschland (1901) is a compendium of German book illustration edited by Otto Grautoff, and its a particularly good anthology with a lot of content I haven’t seen repeated elsewhere. Many of the artists represented have been featured here already, not least because a number of them appeared regularly in Jugend magazine: Thomas Theodor Heine, Ephraim Moses Lilien, Heinrich Vogeler, and the most eccentric of all German artists of the period, the naturist and mystic known as Fidus (Hugo Höppener) whose drawings receive an entire chapter.

Heine’s depiction of “butterfly dancer” Loïe Fuller.

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Jugend, 1900

Continuing the rake through back issues of Jugend magazine, the German fin de siècle periodical of “art and life”, this post covers the year 1900 and will be the final Jugend image trawl. I mentioned in the post for 1899 that the magazine loses its Art Nouveau dynamism as the years pass. 1900 represents the point where all the graphics which make Jugend valued today—and which gave the name to the German manifestation of Art Nouveau: Jugendstil—are being pushed aside by the burgeoning nationalist and militarist fervour which led eventually to the First World War. At this point a couple of the notable Art Nouveau stylists such as Otto Eckman and Julius Diez are still present, and the work of Hugo Höppener, aka “Fidus” is increasingly prominent. In subsequent years the eccentric Fidus is mostly on his own, pursuing his obsession with naked figures, and his work seems even more curious in such staid surrounds. As before, anyone wanting to see more of these graphics is advised to explore the bound volumes at the Heidelberg University archive. The two books for 1900 can be found here and here.

A picture by the Symbolist and Secession artist, Max Klinger.

Nymphs and satyrs by English artist and illustrator Robert Anning Bell.

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Jugend, 1899

Continuing the delve into back issues of Jugend magazine, the German fin de siècle periodical of “art and life”, this post covers the year 1899. The earlier years of the magazine are replete with a variety of elegant and often bizarre graphics, as well as some classic examples of Art Nouveau graphic design. 1899 is the point in the magazine’s history that the variety (and, for me, the interest) begins to diminish. The covers lose their earlier inventiveness while the Art Nouveau stylings within are being replaced by drab illustrations of the German middle classes and patriotic depictions of country folk. There are still gems to be found, however, some of which follow below. As before, anyone wanting to see more of these graphics is advised to explore the bound volumes at the Heidelberg University archive. The two books for 1899 can be found here and here.

Otto Eckman (above) and Julius Diez (below) were heavily featured in the earlier years of the magazine and Diez in particular produces some of the best work in this year’s run.

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Jugend, 1897

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Continuing the series of posts about Jugend magazine, all these samples are from the issues for 1897. This is where things start getting really interesting graphically so I’m only posting a very small selection from 900 pages of content. As before, anyone interested is advised to examine the complete volumes which can be viewed and downloaded here and here.

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Cupid drawings abound in early issues of Jugend, with men and women falling prey to love’s vicissitudes. This is one of the more unusual examples.

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