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 the same year, and a general resurgence of interest in fin de siècle style. Aside from a rare unfinished drawing, there isn’t anything in the booklet which hasn’t been reprinted many times elsewhere but it does contain an excellent overview of the artist’s career by Beardsley scholar Brian Reade.

The V&A website has gained a new feature recently which allows you to search their collections with either a specific search or a random browse. The results don’t give the kind of high-resolution results which I’d like (unlike the British Museum) but the Beardsley works can now be seen in something like their actual condition, edge of the paper and all. Also present is the above piece of Beardsley trivia, a yellowed sheet of wallpaper manufactured by Arthur Sanderson & Sons Ltd in 1967. The Deansgate office of Savoy Books was once covered in this stuff but had unfortunately been papered over by the time I arrived on the scene.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Merely fanciful or grotesque
• Aubrey Beardsley’s musical afterlife
• Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert

It’s taken me years but the recent obsession with UK psychedelia led me to finally watch Joe Massot’s piece of cinematic fluff from 1968, Wonderwall, a film distinguished primarily for its score by George Harrison (with Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton playing pseudonymously), and its title which was swiped years later by a bunch of Rutles-imitators from Manchester. The story is so slight it would have barely sustained an hour-long TV film: absent-minded scientist (Jack MacGowran) becomes intrigued by his glamorous neighbour (Jane Birkin playing “Penny Lane”; yeah, right…) and knocks holes in the walls of his flat in order to scrutinise her modelling, partying and frequent undressing. Unlike Blow Up (1966, and also featuring Jane Birkin) and the later Performance (1970), both of which attempted to accurately pin down some of the modish aspects of the period, this is a very kitsch piece. That wouldn’t be so bad if it was entertaining kitsch like, say, Smashing Time (1967), but Massott has to resort to scenes of limp comedy and some rather dull dream sequences in order to pad the thing out. Between the handful of actual dialogue scenes there’s a lot of gloating over Ms Birkin’s flesh which no doubt satisfied one half of the audience but by today’s standards is hardly thrilling. Iain Quarrier plays Penny’s duplicitous boyfriend (with a fake Liverpool accent) in his last screen role before he quit acting. Quarrier and MacGowran had appeared together in two of Roman Polanski’s British films, Cul-de-sac (1966) and Dance of the Vampires (1967). In the latter, MacGowran again plays an absent-minded scientist while Quarrier is cinema’s first (?) gay vampire.

An interjection from The Fool.

Of chief interest for me in Wonderwall was the decor and title card decorations by Dutch psychedelic collective, The Fool (who appear in the party scene), famous for their earlier Beatles associations including the inner sleeve for Sgt Pepper and designs for the short-lived Apple Boutique in London’s Baker Street. I was also curious about the distinctive decor of MacGowran’s flat which contrasts with the psychedelia next door, all dark green walls embellished with Victorian murals and a Tennyson poem—very fittingly a piece called The Daydream—which circles the room.

The professor prepares to attack the wall.

This was particularly interesting in that it made another connection between the psychedelic era and Victorian arts movements, especially from the Aesthetic/Arts & Crafts end of things, but it wasn’t at all obvious whether the connection was an intentional part of the film’s production design or an accident of location and budgetary convenience. Aside from the old-fashioned appearance of MacGowran’s rooms there seemed no reason why his otherwise cultureless character would have any interest in decorating his living space in this way.

The street corner then…

…and now.

The building itself is equally distinctive and an exterior shot conveniently shows a street sign placing the location in Lansdowne House, a Victorian apartment block on the corner of Lansdowne Road and Ladbroke Road in the Notting Hill/Holland Park area of London.

Lansdowne House.

What did the building look like today, I wondered? Google Earth proves indispensable at times like this and it was easy to find, in a street which looks more cramped than it does in the film. The presence of a blue plaque on the wall proved intriguing, a sign that the place once had famous residents. Googling for that revealed this photo which was a real surprise: Lansdowne House at one time contained studios for artists who included Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, a gay couple and leading lights of London’s fin de siècle art scene (also friends of Oscar Wilde), and another artist, James Pryde, who with William Nicholson worked as The Beggarstaffs. So my suspicion about the Arts & Crafts decor was correct, which means that MacGowran’s flat may have been decorated that way originally and remained untouched since the 1890s. I haven’t seen Rhino’s special edition of Wonderwall which contained additional information about the making of the film, so have no idea whether the history of the building is mentioned there. If anyone does know, please leave a comment. For now I’m quite happy to have stumbled upon another minor link between two of my favourite art decades.

For more visuals, this page has a host of screen grabs from the film as well as some gif animations, all of which manage to make Wonderwall seem more interesting than it is when you’re watching it.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Charles Ricketts’ Hero and Leander
• Images by Robert Altman

L’Androgyne by Alexandre Séon (1890).

Related to yesterday’s post, I’ve been re-reading various books this week for details of the most curious character associated with the French Symbolist movement, novelist and occultist Joséphin Péladan (1859–1918), also known as Sâr Peladan, a Babylonian title he bestowed upon himself as more befitting his adopted role as Rosicrucian mystic. Péladan’s writings and occult art theories spurred many of the painters who banded together as part of his Salon de la Rose+Croix, a kind of anti-salon intended to stand in opposition to what the Sâr saw as the drab realism of the Impressionists and the staid historicism of academic painters. One gets the impression reading about Péladan that he was probably a rather preposterous figure—his obsession with androgyny caused him to change his forename from Joseph to Joséphin yet he kept his length of bristling beard. But, like Oscar Wilde in London, his presence in the pool of fin de siècle art creates considerable ripples. Alexandre Séon, whose frontispiece above was created for Péladan’s semi-autobiographical essay, L’Androgyne, was particularly devoted to him, as was Carlos Schwabe. Séon’s picture depicts “the androgyne Samas, stupefied by the sexual enigma”, a character with whom Péladan fully identified as he describes his youth and its apparent state of androgynous grace.

One doesn’t need a Rosicrucian salon today for examples of creative androgyny, of course, all you have to do is go to Flickr where you’ll find creatures such as the boy above from Roman Mitchenko’s photostream. The photos there are at the fashion end of the spectrum; for more of an amateur or semi-professional perspective there are groups like the Androgyny pool, and the Mommy, I want to be androgynous! pool, the latter featuring many striking boyish girls and girlish boys.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arthur Tress’s Hermaphrodite
• Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal
• Czanara’s Hermaphrodite Angel

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 to the staid Yellow Book, also reviewed in the same column. Beardsley’s illustrations for Pope are now considered some of his very finest works and it’s difficult from our perspective to find any grotesquery there at all. It may be a reference to The Cave of Spleen, a drawing which saw the brief return of Beardsley’s earlier foetus creatures and a work to which some of Harry Clarke’s style would seem to owe a debt. In which case the reviewer should have been grateful to be spared the giant phalluses of The Lysistrata which Aubrey was also drawing for Smithers at this time.

The column above is one of many mentions of Beardsley and company to be found at the British Library’s new online archive of 19th century British newspapers. What might be a treasure trove is compromised slightly for me by being a collection of newspapers only, rather than magazines. A magazine database would give us all of The Savoy and The Yellow Book, as well as other titles which featured the work of fin de siècle illustrators. Patience is the key here, with every passing year more of the past becomes easily accessible.

So now, given the quantity of references there’s likely to be, dare I search for Oscar Wilde?

Previously on { feuilleton }
• “Weirdsley Daubery”: Beardsley and Punch

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 has been called the Father of all the Gods, but most of his children have been stillborn.”

So says a character in The Music on the Hill, one of the slightly more serious stories from Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis (1911). Saki’s Pan is a youthful spirit closer to a faun than the goatish creature of legend. But being a gay writer whose tales regularly feature naked young men (surprisingly so, given the time they were written) I’m sure Saki would have appreciated the Roman statue above. There’s nothing chaste about this Pan with his “token erect of thorny thigh” as Aleister Crowley put it in his lascivious 1929 Hymn to Pan, a poem which caused a scandal when read aloud at his funeral some years later. The Roman statue was for a long while an exhibit in the restricted collection of the Naples National Archaeological Museum where all the more scurrilous and priapic artefacts unearthed at Pompeii were kept safely away from women, children and the great unwashed. These are now on public display and include the notorious statue of a goat being penetrated by a satyr.

Aubrey Beardsley rarely wasted an opportunity to include a faun, satyr, herm or Pan figure in his early drawings, whether suitable or not. His title page for Oscar Wilde’s Salomé featured a herm (censored by the publisher) which had nothing to do with the play, and there’s a Pan figure brandishing pipes in his earlier How King Arthur Saw the Questing Beast, from the Morte D’Arthur. Beardsley was an increasingly celebrated artist by the time he was asked to illustrate the Keynotes series of novels for John Lane in 1893 and with Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, the notoriety of the artist joined forces with an author whose weird tale was condemned as obscene, even as it established Machen as a uniquely gifted writer. Machen knew Crowley via The Golden Dawn and his tale of femme fatale Helen Vaughan was followed by an eruption of Edwardian paganism with Saki’s stories, A Touch of Pan and Pan’s Garden by Algernon Blackwood, The Blessing of Pan by Lord Dunsany, The Goat-Foot God by Dion Fortune and others. There’s even that curious moment in The Wind in the Willows whose seventh chapter, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, finds Mole and Rat having a mystical encounter:

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

If the 18th century looked to the Classical world for order—especially where architecture was concerned—the 19th century seemed to find in Pan a spirit contrary to a world which was altogether too ordered, regimented and industrialised. Artists and writers in Germany seemed to think so when they named their Symbolist periodical after the pagan god. PAN was founded in 1895 and featured a stunning range of fin de siècle talent:

The journal PAN, which was published in Berlin between 1895 and 1900, is regarded as one of the most important voices of Art Nouveau in Germany. Edited by Otto Julius Bierbaum and Julius Meier-Graefem, the journal published numerous illustrations by well-known, and also unknown, young international artists. Additionally, there were full-page original designs, a simple modern typeface, vignettes and other forms of illustration. Some of the more well-known artists who published in PAN include Peter Behrens, Franz von Stuck, Max Klinger, Käthe Kollwitz, Auguste Rodin, Paul Signac and Félix Vallotton. Like the journal Jugend, PAN was critical about the artistic policy of the German Empire under Wilhelm. The journal attempted to present the very best of contemporary art, without showing preference for any particular school or movement, in order to allow comparison with classical art.

Cover by Franz Stuck.

PAN is featured regularly in books about the art of the period but for a long time there was next to nothing about the periodical on websites. That’s changed thanks to the Heidelberg University Library which has the bound collection whose cover is shown above available to view as high-res scans or to download as a single PDF. The text is in German, of course, but there’s a wealth of gorgeous Art Nouveau designs within, as well as many fine illustrations.

Joseph Sattler.

Man, Myth & Magic #1 (1970). Cover illustration is a detail of Elemental aka The Vampires are Coming aka Pan by Austin Osman Spare.

William Burroughs and Brion Gysin regularly mourned the death of Pan in the modern world, despite Burroughs invoking Pan’s spirit (among others) at the opening of Cities of the Red Night while Gysin maintained a lifelong devotion to the panpipe music of the Master Musicians of Joujouka. Pan Books still survives, albeit as a shadow of its former self, and filmgoers have found themselves lost in Pan’s Labyrinth; I produced a mis-proportioned Pan portrait of my own in 1986. There are many other examples to be found. Something about the primal archetype which Pan represents won’t be buried so easily. Pan isn’t dead; far from it, he’s as lively as ever.

Update: Take me into insanity | A Guardian piece about the Joujouka pipers.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peake’s Pan
• Art Nouveau illustration
• Jugend Magazine
• Arthur Machen book covers
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• Hadrian and Greek love
• The Chronicles of Clovis and other sarcastic delights

The Flapper by Frank X Leyendecker, Life magazine (1922).

When I posted this splendid cover last July I said that I ought to make a post of Butterfly Women, so here is one. Don’t expect this to be at all comprehensive, women with butterfly wings are as legion as mermaids, these are merely a couple of favourites.

Loïe Fuller by Koloman Moser (1901).

The ultimate butterfly woman must be Loïe Fuller (1862–1928) whose Serpentine Dance inspired a host of fin de siècle paintings and sculptures and was also filmed by the Lumière brothers in 1896. Archive.org has a tinted copy of the latter while Europa Film Treasures has an Italian short from 1907, Farfale (Butterflies) with a troupe of dancers (also hand-tinted) imitating the Fuller style.

Life magazine cover by Wladyslaw Benda (1923).

These two pictures were discovered via the wonderful Golden Age Comic Book Stories who always has the best scans of vintage art. The Life covers are from the humour periodical which expired in 1936, not the later photojournalism magazine. For more Life covers, look here.

Dragonfly by Alberto Vargas (1922).

Okay, so it’s called Dragonfly but those look more like butterfly wings to me. A delicate piece of Vargas cheesecake which echoes the flapper theme of the Leyendecker picture. This Flickr user has a whole set of butterfly girl cigarette cards but we don’t get to see them properly without paying. If anyone has seen them elsewhere, please leave a comment.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mermaids
• Wladyslaw Benda
• Vintage magazine art II
• Vintage magazine art

A typically splendid fin de siècle cover design by Léon Rudnicki for an 1898 volume of childhood memoirs by Jean Lorrain (1855–1906). The author was a flamboyantly homosexual poet, novelist and journalist whose addiction to ether and other excesses ended his life at the age of 50. Philippe Jullian is quoted on glbtq.com as saying Lorrain was “truly, at the fin de siècle, Sodom’s ambassador to Paris”. Jullian, as I never tire of repeating, wrote the best book on the Symbolist period, Dreamers of Decadence (1971), and that quote reminds me that I ought to track down a copy of his Lorrain biography.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Le Sphinx Mystérieux (1897).

Charles van der Stappen’s most impressive sculptural work and one I missed including in this earlier post. Van der Stappen doesn’t seem to have done anything else like this which is a shame as it’s a very iconic fin de siècle image, conveying a sense of enigma without resorting to the usual human/animal hybrids; Sarah Bernhardt would have loved the costume. This picture was swiped from Beautiful Century and Mariana took it from the book with the best reproduction I’ve seen to date, Gabriele Fahr-Becker’s Art Nouveau.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• La belle sans nom
• The Feminine Sphinx
• Le Monstre
• Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal
• Empusa

Parsifal by Jean Delville (1890).

Continuing the occasional series of posts examining the evolution of a particular design or image, this one begins with a mystical charcoal drawing by Belgian Symbolist, Jean Delville (1867–1953), our object of concern being that entranced or dreaming face.

My first encounter with Delville’s image wasn’t via the original but came with this Seventies’ version produced for a Charles Williams paperback cover by illustrator Jim Lamb. (And this copy is the only one I can find, reused on a recent audiobook of Williams’ novel. If anyone has a link to a larger copy of the paperback cover then please post it in the comments.) Yes, this is tenuous but when I eventually got to see Delville’s picture it made me think immediately of Lamb’s illustration. Many Dimensions is one of my favourite books by Williams and unusually for him it deals with Islamic rather than Christian mysticism; in that case if Lamb was borrowing from Parsifal then it’s a case of the right image for the wrong book.

Jim Lamb is another illustrator from this period who now works mainly as a landscape artist.

The Call of Cthulhu (1988).

In 1987 I plundered Delville myself for The Call of Cthulhu as a means of showing dreaming artist Henry Wilcox whose visions of R’lyeh are one of the key events in the story. The Symbolist reference also connects him to that school of art although the sole example I showed of his painting owed more to Max Ernst. This is just one of many examples of intertextuality (or outright thievery) in my Cthulhu adaptation. I suppose one day I ought to list the others.

25th Human Be-In by Stanley Mouse (1991).

The inevitable psychedelic appropriation comes rather late with this poster by Stanley Mouse which not only lifts the face but reworks the whole drawing. I noted earlier Mouse’s fondness for fin de siècle imagery so the use of Delville comes as no surprise; the psychedelic artists enjoyed borrowing Symbolist and Art Nouveau motifs. And I’m sure this isn’t the last word on the use of Delville’s Parsifal. If there are other examples out there, post a comment.

Update: Mike suggests the Barney Bubbles painting of Miss Stacia on the sleeve of Space Ritual by Hawkwind. Barney’s Hawkwind art of this period owed a great deal to Alphonse Mucha but, given his considerable knowledge of art history, there could well be some Delville in there as well. So here it is.

Space Ritual (detail) by Barney Bubbles (1973).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Willy Pogàny’s Parsifal
• William Rimmer’s Evening Swan Song
• San Francisco angels

Colette.

Work this week designing a CD of readings from Colette had me searching books for pictures of the author. Of the few I found this is the most interesting, one of several Colette portraits made by photographer Leopold Reutlinger and one of at least two from 1907 which Colette used to promote her Moulin Rouge pantomime, Rêve d’Égypte. (You can see another one here.) The Egyptian theme explains the sphinx pose and her costume but there’s no indication as to whether the pose was borrowed from Franz Stuck’s famous painting (below) or whether the resemblance is coincidental.

The Sphinx by Franz Stuck (1889).

Stuck produced two nearly identical paintings on this theme; the other version is here in a rather muddy copy. I like the frame design for this one which explains in pictures the secret of the famous riddle which the Sphinx asks of Oedipus, “Which creature goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three in the evening?” Stuck painted another sphinx picture three years earlier, The Kiss of the Sphinx, which portrays a less feminine and distinctly more rapacious hybrid.

Ida Rubenstein.

Colette was famously bisexual and so too was dancer Ida Rubenstein. In the same book as the Colette picture, there’s this photo of Ida recumbent in a sphinx-like pose in a very exotic boudoir. Photographs such as these are the material connection between the extravagances of the fin de siècle and the Decadent strain of early cinema in works such as Cabiria (written by Ida Rubenstein’s friend Gabriele D’Annunzio), Intolerance and (of course) Alla Nazimova’s Salomé.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Heidi Taillefer
• Dorian Gray revisited
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• The art of Giulio Artistide Sartorio, 1860–1932

All Is Vanity by Charles Allan Gilbert (1892).

The surreptitious skull is another of those perennial motifs that recur in art from time to time and one which has become especially prevalent since the late 19th century. There seem to be a number of reasons for this, the most obvious being that if you’re going to show how clever you are by hiding one image inside another you may as well make the hidden thing something that everyone recognises. A secondary reason would seem to be the waning power of the vanitas theme. As painting became more pictorially sophisticated it wasn’t enough to simply show a skull and expect people to accept that and a stern moral as the principal content. Hence the development of death as a non-skeletal character in Symbolism and the reduction of skulls in pictures to a kind of playful game.

Holbein’s anamorphic skull in The Ambassadors is probably the grandfather of all the later versions but the more recent popularity of the hidden motif can be traced back to Charles Allan Gilbert whose 1892 picture, All is Vanity, drawn when he was just 18, was sold to Life Publishing in 1902 and subsequently spread all over the world in postcard form. Despite giving birth to a host of imitators, Gilbert’s picture is the one that still inspires artists and photographers up to the present day.

A Pierrot’s Love (uncredited) (1905).

Another very popular version.

La Famille Impériale de Russie; French postcard (1908).

In Voluptate Mors by Salvador Dalí & Philippe Halsman (1951).

Dalí was the master of this kind of pictorial illusion, of course, and worked several of his own variations with skulls. The most famous is the Philippe Halsman photograph which was recapitulated in the poster art for The Silence of the Lambs in 1991 and, more recently, The Descent.

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot (1982).

Gilbert’s picture started to be reproduced as a poster from the Sixties on and eventually began influencing rock album sleeve art. There’s more than enough examples of these, most of them pretty ropey. The Damned used Gilbert’s picture in 1977 while Def Leppard produced their own version for Retro Active in 1993. Far better than the metal attempts was Trevor Brown’s sleeve for Coil’s Hellraiser Themes EP which you can see on his blog page along with some other 20th century examples of the motif.

Bryan Talbot’s panel from the first book of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright is less well-known. I’m sure there’s been a lot of this kind of thing in the comics world over the years but Bryan’s version is the only one I have to hand.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm (1991).

And speaking of comics, here’s my own variation in a panel from Reverbstorm #3, drawn in 1991 but not published until 1995.

Hellblazer (unpublished) (1994).

One of the editors at DC Comics liked my Lovecraft and Lord Horror work and asked me to do a tryout for a Hellblazer cover in 1994. I’d only just switched from gouache to painting with acrylics at the time and didn’t feel very confident about using them but also didn’t want to turn the offer down. The painting above was the result and they didn’t like it. I thought I was trying to be clever by doing the skull thing when all they wanted to see was a portrait of John Constantine, not a guy with his face blotted by shadow.

Poison by Dior, photographed by Vincent Peters (2002).

And so to the 21st century and this award-winning ad shot which brings us full circle with a copy of Gilbert’s original picture.

The effect was achieved with skilful lighting, set design and photography rather than post-production trickery, says Peters.

“The image recalls the blending of art and psychology that occurred at the end of the 19th century. I shot it straight, with very little post-production. The trickiest part was getting the composition right – there was only one spot I could take the shot from; an inch to the left or right and the effect would have been spoiled.”

He stresses that the resulting image was “a collaborative effort” and makes special mention of the agency’s creative team. “The agency came to me with the idea and asked me how I would do it. These day it’s rare to be approached for your technical skills. Normally it’s because you can achieve a certain mood. In this case I added the fin de siècle atmosphere.”

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Darwin Day
• Vanitas paintings
• Giant Skeleton and the Chocolate Jesus
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Very Hungry God
• Dalí Atomicus
• History of the skull as symbol

Continuing the theme of the fin de siècle feminine, there’s this bizarre (undated) piece by Marcel Lenoir representing…what? A witch? Some demoness? Or woman in general? Considering the often overt misogyny of the period, the latter interpretation is quite possible; there were more than enough artists prepared to see women as the foundation of all evil as well as place them on pedestals. In our post-Freudian age it’s impossible not to do a double-take at a picture of a bare-breasted woman gripping a pair of cocks…

Marcel Lenoir is yet another artist who receives scant attention online but I did find this nice magazine cover from an 1897 number of L’Image. There’s more splendid cover scans here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Divine Sarah
• Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal
• Empusa
• The art of Philippe Wolfers, 1858–1929
• The Masks of Medusa

Sarah Bernhardt by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1895).

You can’t be a fin de siècle fetishist and not develop a fascination with actress Sarah Bernhardt, a woman who was muse to many of the era’s finest artists, most notably Alphonse Mucha, who she employed as her official designer. Mucha’s marvellous posters are endlessly popular, of course; less well-known is the sculpture by academic painter and Orientalist Jean-Léon Gérôme, a rare three-dimensional work inspired by the actress.

Inkwell by Sarah Bernhardt (1880).

Even less well-known is Ms Bernhardt’s own design for a curious bat-winged inkwell. I’ve read of her having created other sculptural works but so far this is the only one I’ve seen a picture of. With something as decadent as this you’d really have to use peacock quills for pens, wouldn’t you?

Bracelet by Alphonse Mucha & Georges Fouquet (1899).

And in a similar sinister vein to the inkwell there’s this serpentine bracelet and ring, a superb one-off, designed by Mucha and crafted by the jeweller Fouquet. After seeing works such as this and the Lalique dragonfly (which Ms Bernhardt once wore), most other jewellery seems timid and unadventurous in comparison.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Philippe Wolfers, 1858–1929
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard
• Smoke
• The Masks of Medusa

The Empusae, we’re told, were daughters of Hecate in Greek mythology, sent to harass the unwary traveller on lonely roads, as if travellers on lonely roads didn’t have enough to worry about from human malefactors. The sinister femme fatale of mythology was a popular subject among fin de siècle artists which perhaps explains why CH Schmidt-Helmbrechts (1871–1936) went to such trouble with this etching of one of the baleful demonesses.

There’s very little information about Schmidt-Helmbrechts on the web and little of his other work to be seen; this picture was scanned from High Art and Low Life: ‘The Studio’ and the fin de siècle (1993) and even there they don’t give a date for it although I’d guess it was a product of the 1890s. The description does say it was printed in olive, however, so I’ve taken the liberty of tinting their black and white version accordingly. I’ve no idea what the musical notes at the bottom left are for but I like the lettering design, there’s almost enough of it to develop into a font.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Philippe Wolfers, 1858–1929
• The Masks of Medusa

Maléficia (1905).

Much of the jewellery and sculpture produced by Phillipe Wolfers demonstrates the tendency of Art Nouveau and decorative Symbolism to evolve from Decadence to full-blown Gothic. The sinister recurs in Wolfers’ creations whether in the form of baleful females such as Malèficia and his Medusa pendant, or in the shape of bats, insects and the ubiquitous fin de siècle serpent. There’s more Wolfers on the web than there was a couple of years ago but still too little; I scanned Malèficia from a book and swiped the bat brooch belt buckle (also a book scan) from Beautiful Century.

Large dragonfly (1903–04).

Le Jour et la Nuit (1897).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard
• The Masks of Medusa

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 painting and furnishings would clash, hence the invitation for Whistler to help with the colour scheme.

I’ve always preferred this luscious, gold-leafed design to the worthy medievalism of contemporary William Morris. Even though Whistler completed the work prior to the 1890s, the combination of Orientalism and peacocks (the signature bird of the Decadence) seems very much tied to the fin de siècle not least because of Aubrey and Mabel Beardsley’s visit to the room in 1891. Beardsley was very impressed with the painting and with the golden birds, the style of which later formed the inspiration for his famous Peacock Skirt illustration in Salomé (1894).

There’s a good overview here of the history of the room, including details of the falling out between the combative artist and his client, and the story of the room’s removal to America and subsequent restoration.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé

I first came across Sascha Schneider’s art some years ago when reading about German writer Karl May (1842–1912), and it was as May’s illustrator that Schneider initially gained recognition. May was one of Germany’s most popular novelists, his Western adventures about Old Shatterhand and Winnetou the Warrior having sold up to 100 million copies. Albert Einstein and Adolf Hitler were among their many enthusiasts. Schneider’s work struck me as unusual compared to other illustrators of the period; there was a curious quality which seemed to owe more to Symbolist painting than book illustration and the few examples I saw were distinctly homoerotic at a time when homosexuality was regarded with suspicion or downright hostility. Sure enough it turns out that Schneider was openly gay and that May had no problem with this. It also transpires that the Symbolist tone which seemed so unsuited to a writer of Western pulp fiction complemented the content of some of May’s later works which weren’t Westerns at all but were Orientalist fantasies with a metaphysical inclination. The publisher wasn’t too happy with the ambivalent nature of these pictures, however, and they were replaced in later editions.

For once I don’t have to complain about a lack of website examples, Schneider’s connections with May have at least ensured his work is still being written about even if it seems overlooked by gay art histories. This latter circumstance is unusual since he was a contributor to Der Eigene, the world’s first gay periodical, founded by Adolf Brand in 1896.

I’ve taken the liberty of posting more samples than usual here and you’ll have to forgive the lack of information about titles and dates. Many of the pictures are quite bizarre for the way they’re continually juxtaposing naked figures with angels, demons or monsters. Even the Winnetou illustrations, which should be depicting Native Americans, look more suited to the wall of a salon in fin de siècle Paris than stories of the Wild West. Links to various galleries follow.

• Schneider’s Karl May frontispieces
• An extensive Russian gallery
• A smaller Schneider gallery

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The illustrators archive

The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects by Alexandra David-Neel & Lama Yongden, City Lights Books (1972).

One of the additional pleasures of buying old books besides finding something out-of-print (or, it has to be said, something cheap) occurs when those books still possess traces of their previous owners. A recent posting on The Other Andrew’s page concerned book inscriptions, something any book collector will be used to seeing. Less common are the objects which slip from the pages when you’ve returned home. There are several categories of these.

1: Bookmarks

I have a substantial collection of bookmarks proper, from embossed strips of leather to the more mundane pieces of card of the type that bookshops frequently give away. But I also make a habit of using odd inserts to mark a place as did the previous owners of these volumes. The City Lights book (above) came with a very fragile leaf inside it which may well be as old as the book. Another City Lights book I own, the Artaud Anthology from 1965, included a newspaper article about Artaud. Newspaper clipping inserts are discussed below.

Best stories of Walter de la Mare, Faber & Faber (1947).

This volume contained a Greek banknote which I still use as a bookmark. Walter de la Mare is remembered more for his poems than his short stories which is unfortunate, his fiction always seems unjustly neglected, the sole exception being Seaton’s Aunt which turns up in many anthologies. This is an excellent collection and includes his finest eerie tales, many of which I regard as superior to MR James whose spooks often seem too obviously drawn. De la Mare’s approach was a lot more subtle. His stories rarely possess any overt supernatural presence yet deliver superb atmospheres of unease which often shade into outright dread.

Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert, JM Dent (1931).

Sometimes the bookmarks come with the book themselves, as with this slip advertising the Everyman’s Encyclopedia. This book also contains a tiny label from the shop where it was purchased, Willshaw’s in Manchester, one of our long lost—and sorely missed—bookshops.

The Hollywood book (below) was a TV series tie-in which included a bookmark advertising the soundtrack album.

Hollywood: The Pioneers by Kevin Brownlow & John Kobal, Collins (1979).

The Story of the World in Pictures, edited by Harley Usill & H Douglas Thomson, Odhams Press (1934).

This wasn’t a bookmark but served the same function as the previous two examples in being an advert for more product. It opens into an order form for The New Pictorial Atlas of the World, yours for only 2 shillings and sixpence, or 12.5 pence in today’s currency.

2: Newspaper cuttings

These are occasionally reviews of the book in hand but not always.

George Steiner: A Reader, Pelican (1984).

George Steiner’s collection of writings on literature included a clipping of one of his book reviews (although he says it isn’t “a review”), a description of The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy by Martin Gilbert from the (London) Sunday Times. That was from 1986 and it’s an education to look at the property prices on the back of the book page, with adverts for London flats and houses now worth ten times the amount they were then.

French Symbolist Painters, Arts Council of Great Britain (1972).

A very decent exhibition catalogue (which, at £15 ten years ago, was also rather expensive) spoiled slightly by being mostly black and white reproductions. Many of the pictures within I don’t have elsewhere. The newspaper clipping was a review of the exhibition when it opened at the Hayward.

3: Ex Libris plates

Bookplates aren’t so common these days, not least because the idea of having a personal library has gone completely out of fashion. You find them in older hardbacks but I’ve yet to see one in a paperback.

The Aesthetic Adventure by William Gaunt, Jonathan Cape & the Book Society (1945).

This is a battered volume made with cheap boards and paper due to being produced to the War Economy Standard which limited the materials available for printing. I keep intending to find another copy as it’s an excellent overview of Victorian art from the Pre-Raphaelites through the fin de siècle. The bookplate here seems to have come with the book and the drawing on this one is by Rex Whistler who was a tank commander during the war and who died in Normandy only a year before. His namesake (but no relation), James Whistler, is one of the artists whose work Gaunt examines.

Update: Seeing as Rex Whistler’s work suffers from continual web neglect, I’ve added a larger copy of the plate.

Men and Memories by William Rothenstein, Coward-McCann (1931).

Update 2: One I’d forgotten about which I couldn’t resist adding here. William Rothenstein (1872–1945) was a well-regarded portrait artist and a friend of Max Beerbohm which means he moved in all the right artistic circles in the London of the 1890s. This is an American first edition of his memoirs and makes a nice companion volume to William Gaunt’s study, being a recounting of his friendships with Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Whistler, Sickert et al. This is also another book with a seller’s label on the inside back cover (below), and a particularly fine example at that. If you want to know more about book labels, Seven Roads has a great collection.

The Key of Solomon the King, Routledge & Kegan Paul (1976).

It’s perhaps typical of an occult book that it should contain a bookplate which then remains unsigned; occult means “hidden”, after all. Whoever owned this, I bought another volume belonging to the same person and both books have retained a very peculiar smell, like a blend of sweet incense and talcum powder. The smell of books, whether their own or the scent they acquire, is a whole other area of study, and one I’ll happily leave to others to explore.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• T&H: At the Sign of the Dolphin
• The art of Rex Whistler, 1905–1944

Or Lust (1919), Envy (1919) and Pride (1918). Very Beardsley-esque posters by Carlo Nicco for a series of Italian films from the silent era starring Francesca Bertini. Doubtless the prolific Ms. Bertini’s demonstrations of the Seven Deadly Sins inspired similar promotional artwork for the other films in the series but these are the only ones visible from this Flickr collection of Italian cinema memorabilia. As with Alla Nazimova’s Salomé (and Gabriel D’Annunzio’s excessive Salammbô-esque epic, Cabiria), this confirms again that fin de siècle Decadence lived on in the early days of cinema, having been banished (for a time) from the worlds of art and literature.

Via Fabulon. (Thanks Thom!)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• The art of Giulio Artistide Sartorio, 1860–1932
• Metropolis posters

Laocoön and His Sons attributed to Agesander, Athenodoros
and Polydorus of Rhodes (c. 160–20 BCE).

No jokes about snakes in a frame, please. Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (1986) is a wide-ranging study of the “iconography of misogyny” in 19th century painting. Dijkstra examines the numerous ways that women were depicted in late Victorian and Symbolist art, with one chapter, “Connoisseurs and Bestiality and Serpentine Delights”, being devoted to representations of women with animals, especially snakes. The story of Eve and the Serpent prompts many of these latter images, of course, while scenes with other creatures seem intended to demonstrate the Victorian attitude that woman was closer to the brute beasts than man and could often be found conspiring with them to bring down her masculine masters.

Needless to say, men have rarely been depicted so uncharitably; when men encounter animals in art the animals are usually being put to some use or roundly slaughtered. The sole exception seems to be when snakes are involved although these still tend to be scenes of conflict. This raises no end (as it were) of Freudian implications. Dragons have a lengthy history in art, from images of St Michael and St George to various legends, but snakes really came into their own in western art with the discovery of the Laocoön statue in 1506. This ancient sculpture, depicting Laocoön and his sons being attacked by serpents, had been acclaimed by Pliny as one of the greatest of all works of art, a judgement with which Renaissance artists agreed. Many of Michelangelo’s figures are inspired by the muscular dynamism of the statue and subsequent artists approaching this or similar subjects have acknowledged its influence and mastery of the form.

Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra by François Joseph Bosio (1824).

Most depictions of the Lernean Hydra show a kind of dragon creature with multiple heads. Bosio depicts something more like a regular snake, albeit a huge one.

An Athlete Wrestling with a Python by Frederic, Lord Leighton (1877).

The posture of Leighton’s athlete is reminiscent of Bosio’s Hercules but owes more to Michelangelo and the Laocoön. Speculation persists concerning Leighton’s sexuality, a speculation fuelled in part by this statue. He never married despite being extremely wealthy, was a friend of upper class gay men and yet his personal life remains veiled, which is no surprise considering he was President of the Royal Academy and the first (and only) artist to be made a Lord. Have a look at his Daedalus and Icarus and draw your own conclusions.

The Call of Cthulhu (1988).

I placed a rather poorly-rendered copy of Leighton’s statue into one of the panels of The Call of Cthulhu, among a number of other art references. The posture there is repeated at the end of the story when the sailors are attacked by a reawakened monster.

Conan by Margaret Brundage, Weird Tales, August 1934.

Twentieth century art has little room for the figures of myth and legend so it’s been left to genre fiction and the pulps to continue these themes. Margaret Brundage painted many covers for Weird Tales during the magazine’s peak in the Thirties but she was never very good with representations of men. Her depiction of Robert E Howard’s Conan the Barbarian looks rather insipid next to the work of later Conan illustrators such as Roy Krenkel.

Hercules by George Quaintance (1957).

And so the erotic dimension declares itself at last with the work of one of the classic beefcake artists. Quaintance manages to combine elements of the Bosio and Leighton statues while placing them in the context of overtly gay erotica.

Chained by Frank Frazetta; cover to Conan the Usurper by Robert E Howard (1967).

No one ever called Frank Frazetta gay unless they wanted to risk a punch in the mouth. Frazetta is probably the snake attack artist par excellence. He’s also the definitive painter of Conan and the picture above was used on the cover of one of the Lancer reprints which introduced Robert E Howard’s books to a new generation of readers in the late Sixties.

Serpent by Frank Frazetta; cover to Ardor on Argos by Andrew Offutt (1973).

And still they come. This recent (1991) adventure concerning Lester Dent’s pulp hero was painted by Joe DeVito. Bringing things (almost) full circle, the artist has also created a bronze statue based on his picture which looks remarkably like Leighton’s struggling athlete.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• My pastiches
• Fantastic art from Pan Books
• Philip Core and George Quaintance
• The Masks of Medusa
• The art of Giulio Artistide Sartorio, 1860–1932

Alla Nazimova was another of these exotic creatures, and rather more exotic than most since she was at least a genuine Russian, even if she also had to amend her given name (Mariam Edez Adelaida Leventon) to exaggerate the effect. Like an opera diva or a great ballerina she dropped her forename as her career progressed, and is billed as Nazimova only in her 1923 screen adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play, Salomé. Nazimova inaugurated the project, produced it and even part-financed it since the studios, increasingly worried by pressure from moral campaigners, regarded it as a dangerously decadent work. Nazimova had a rather colourful off-screen life and the stories of orgiastic revels at her mansion, the Garden of Allah, probably didn’t help matters.

Salomé lobby card (1923).

Salomé: The Peacock Skirt by Aubrey Beardsley (1893).

It may seem bizarre to make a silent film of a stage play but silent adaptations of Shakespeare had been around since film’s earliest days. The task of adapting Wilde was given to Natacha Rambova, wife of Rudolph Valentino. If you’re going to cut down the available dialogue, however, it helps if the audience is familiar with the story. Nazimova’s audience in 1923 would have known of Salomé from their Bibles but Wilde’s play has rarely been considered a stage masterwork and remains largely unknown even today. The film’s intertitles were deemed too wordy and the production flopped as a result. This is a shame since the film is a curiosity, not least for the decision to base the production design on the Aubrey Beardsley illustrations that have accompanied (overshadowed, even) the printed edition of the play since its first publication.

Salomé: The Climax by Aubrey Beardsley (1893).

The film remains intriguing also for its distinctly gay aura. Nazimova was a lesbian and, in one of those rumours that persists around certain productions, was said to have demanded that most, if not all, the cast be gay or bisexual. The director certainly was. Charles Bryant (also an actor) lived with Nazimova in what was known at the time as a “lavender marriage”, a partnership between a gay man and a lesbian that enabled both to masquerade in a manner acceptable to contemporary mores. I haven’t read Gavin Lambert’s biography of Nazimova so details about the rest of the cast are sketchy but we know there was at least one other gay actor involved. Arthur Jasmine who played the page of Herodias was known in later life as Sampson (also Samson) de Brier and his house and person feature prominently in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954).

Nazimova and Arthur Jasmine in a shot modelled on Beardsley’s Peacock Skirt.

Salomé is available in the US on DVD accompanied by another curious Biblical work with prurient interest, Lot in Sodom (1933).

On a final note, the associations between Salomé and silent cinema carry over to my own Salomé picture from 2002. This was a Photoshop collage which began life as a rather chaste still of silent star Norma Talmadge. I gave Norma a pair of bare breasts, a beaded necklace, bangles and a severed head to hold. I hope she forgives me.

Salomé by Coulthart (2002).

• Salomé movie photo gallery
• A review from Motion Picture magazine, October 1922
• The complete text of Wilde’s play in French (as originally written) and English
• A complete set of Beardsley’s Salomé illustrations

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fantazius Mallare and the Kingdom of Evil
• The Decorative Age
• Images of Nijinsky
• Metropolis posters
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

More obscure art, only now we’re talking really obscure. This remarkable picture, The Hermaphrodite-Angel of Peladan by Czanara, turned up in the archives of Russ Kick’s seemingly abandoned Rare Erotica blog. “Czanara” was one Raymond Carrance (1921–?), a gay artist who I haven’t come across before and who seems to be completely absent not only from my library, but from most of the web. A great shame, if there’s more of his work like this I want to see it.

The “Peladan” of the title might be a reference to Sâr Péladan, founder of the Catholic Order of the Rose and the Cross in fin de siècle Paris, and guru to a number of significant Symbolist painters, including the brilliant Jean Delville. Hermaphroditism and androgyny were important themes for Péladan who declared, in an outburst typical of the period, “the androgyne, is the plastic ideal!” Czanara’s picture is certainly Symbolist in its details—those multiplied wings and hippogriffs—even if its intent is most likely a result of mundane pornographic imperatives.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Angels 4: Fallen angels

A big subject, then, that’ll no doubt be returned to in later postings. Looking around for images of dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky in his celebrated (and notorious) role in L’Après-midi d’un Faune turned up not only Leon Bakst’s luscious drawing but some marvelous Beardsley-esque pictures by George Barbier (1882–1932). I’d seen some of Barbier’s work before but didn’t realise he’d created a whole book devoted to the dancer. Artists like Bakst, Erté and Barbier show how Aubrey Beardsley’s art might have developed had he not died prematurely in 1898. You can see the full set of book plates here.

Nijinsky as faun by Leon Bakst (1912).

Designs on the Dances of Vaslav Nijinsky (and below) by George Barbier (1913).

L’ Apres-midi d’un Faune.

Narcisse.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Nicholas Kalmakoff, 1873–1955

Lucifer (no date).

…I find nothing fantastic in so-called fantastic art, it is an aspect of reality in search of sanity beyond the normal bounds. I believe that fantastic art is related to the protective dream, that it prolongs the healing dream and finds symbols that change dread into wonder, strangeness and beauty.

As in all figurative art, fantastic art must of course be judged not only by its intentions but by the quality of the execution, and by standards that have been almost totally lost in the turbulence of changing fashions, movements and politics on the art market. This has led to a noticeable helplessness among the critics, who seem to ignore a growing tendency toward the fantastic in the hope that it will fade away and die. I do not believe it will.

Thomas Häfner.

Who was Thomas Häfner? Good question, because he’s virtually invisible on the web. The painting above is scanned from David Larkin’s excellent Fantastic Art (Pan/Ballantine, 1973) and was also used as a cover image for an edition of Blaise Cendrars‘ scurrilous masterpiece, Moravagine. The Demon Woman below is a watercolour original for sale on eBay. Häfner was a member of a group of German artists who called themselves the Young Realists, formed in Düsseldorf in the mid-Fifties. Significantly, another group of young imaginative painters was active at the same time in Vienna, the Fantastic Realists, who included the great Ernst Fuchs among their number. “Realism” here can be considered as referring to a style that favoured the hard-edged realistic approach of Surrealism; Häfner’s content certainly wasn’t realistic.

These people remain neglected or unknown because art critics like to pretend there’s only one story being told in the development of art at any given time when there are usually several, often with conflicting agendas. So we’re always being informed that the dominant movement in fin de siècle Paris was Impressionism and hear little of the Symbolists who were equally—if not more—popular, productive and influential during that period.

(This laziness carries over to other areas; Debussy is continually described as “an Impressionist composer” when one of his most famous works, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, was based on a Symbolist poem by Mallarmé. There are no fauns in Impressionist paintings.)

The prevailing trend in the mid-Fifties was the thin gruel of Abstract Expressionism, the complete antithesis of the kind of art being produced by Häfner, Fuchs and company. There’s a reason for the elevation of this type of work over others. Critics such as Clement Greenberg saw abstraction (which, ironically, grew out of Surrealism) as being a politically acceptable direction after the turmoil of the Second World War. The Nazis liked realism in their art, while the Soviets under Stalin and the Chinese under Mao had declared Socialist Realism to be the official art of the Communist Revolution, therefore realism of any variety was reactionary and bad. Further irony comes when the CIA agreed with this argument and secretly promoted Abstract Expressionism outside America. This has led us to the situation we have today where a Willem de Kooning painting, Woman III (1952–53), was recently sold for $137.5 million, which means collecting this kind of work is now a game for billionaires. It really would be the final irony if the kind of realistic art that Clement Greenberg despised was elevated to a new popularity by over-priced abstraction as collectors with fewer assets were forced to look elsewhere. Critics can protest all they like but these days it’s money that speaks with the loudest voice in the art world.

Demon Woman (no date).

Update: added another picture discovery:

Masken in zerfallener Umgebung (1974).

Update 2: and another:

Marionetten (1964).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of one of my favourite artists, Austin Osman Spare.

Like many people in the 1970s, I was introduced to the work of Austin Spare by Man, Myth and Magic, a seven volume “illustrated encyclopedia of the supernatural” published weekly in 120 112 parts by Purnell. My mother was a Dennis Wheatley fan so we had a couple of occult paperbacks in the house, among them one of William Seabrook’s accounts of voodoo in Haiti and a copy of Richard Cavendish’s wonderful magical primer, The Black Arts, (later retitled The Magical Arts). Cavendish had been chosen as editor of Man, Myth and Magic and included occultist and writer Kenneth Grant on his editorial staff, a decision that gave the book’s producers access to Grant’s collection of Spare pictures. In a rather bold move, they launched Man, Myth and Magic in 1970 with a detail of a Spare drawing on the cover, a work often referred to as The Elemental although the authoritative Spare collection, Zos Speaks has it titled as The Vampires are Coming. It’s a shame that AOS didn’t live for a few more years to see this; after labouring in poverty and obscurity for most of his life he would have found his work flooding Britain, with this first issue on sale all over the country and the cover picture being pasted on billboards and sold as posters. It’s possible there were even television adverts for the book (although I don’t recall any), since there usually were for expensive part works like this.

Spare was born in London in 1886 and like many other artists from the 19th and early 20th century had come back into favour thanks to the attentions of a new generation with an interest in mysticism and decadence. An Aubrey Beardsley renaissance that began in the mid-Sixties (Spare knew Beardsley’s sister, Mabel, and drew a portrait of her) pulled lesser-known artists into its orbit like Harry Clarke, (who Spare published in his magazine The Golden Hind) and Félicien Rops. Man, Myth and Magic was marketed as much at the hippie youth culture as at people with a vague occult interest like my mother; that first issue probably put Spare’s work before more people in a single day than had seen his work in his entire lifetime.

After the part work Man, Myth and Magic had been running for a while, the first six issues were gathered together and sold as a bound book and it was one of these volumes that my mother bought. Eventually that book and all the other occult titles in the house ended up in my possession. The “elemental” picture wasn’t used on the book cover but was reproduced inside in black and white as illustration for an essay by Kenneth Grant on “Atavisms”. Grant very commendably had used his position as advisor on this high-profile publication to talk up Spare as much as possible, and devoted half the article to him. At the time I didn’t quite understand what exactly “resurgent atavisms” were supposed to be but the combination of those strange words and the three Spare pictures accompanying the article (plus others elsewhere in the book) made a profound impression. Unfortunately this was all I knew of the artist for some time until subsequent scouring of local libraries turned up more of his drawings in occult encyclopedias. Eventually I started to collect Grant’s own rather bewildering magical treatises, most of which involve some discussion of Spare’s techniques of sigil magic and include reproductions of paintings and drawings.

Looking back now it’s interesting to see how much my image of Spare as a person has altered over the course of thirty years. Grant’s discussion of magic in any context tends to play up the Lovecraftian dimension of the subject, presenting a world of serious, if not downright dangerous, occult experiment where people frequently lose their reason or their lives to malign elemental forces. As a result, he invariably gives a rather one-sided picture of Spare, presenting him as a baleful magus a world away from Aleister Crowley’s often playful and witty persona. This view can be reinforced in many of Spare’s self-portraits whereas Crowley’s reputation as “the wickedest man in the world” tends to be undermined by photographs of him in later life as a genial old duffer, albeit one with a formidable heroin habit and a talent for ruining the lives of those around him. The sinister side of Spare was only ameliorated for me with the publication of Zos Speaks in 1998 which includes lengthy extracts from Kenneth Grant’s diaries recounting their meetings in London shortly after the end of the Second World War. Finally AOS was revealed as a human being, and a very warm and friendly one at that. This doesn’t diminish the power of his work but at last he seemed like someone you might share a drink with in one of his favourite pubs.

Self-portrait (1907).

Despite his considerable talents as an artist, the art world has never known what to do with Austin Osman Spare. Just as MC Escher is lauded by mathematicians and physicists while being ignored in art histories, so Spare has a substantial reputation in the occult world but his work as an artist has been continually undervalued. The contemporary art world (much like the contemporary literary world) resents an expressive imagination and they especially resent individuals who won’t fit the neat procession of their established history. Galleries and curators have spent decades happily supporting inferior work with bogus justifications but seem to baulk when asked to consider Spare’s work as being the product of an elaborate and seriously-felt philosophical system. I’ve a great respect for V&A curator Stephen Calloway but his comment here about Spare in an exhibition catalogue is a typical reaction:

In the years following Beardsley’s death, Spare was one of the most promising younger artists and made a number of exquisitely detailed drawings in a Beardsleyesque manner. He later became influenced by spiritualism (sic) and perhaps also by drugs, and turned to making “automatic” drawings, which though spirited from time to time, and perhaps somewhat accidentally expressive, are generally rather poor things compared with his fine early works.*

Occult matters aside, what I value in Spare’s work is his uniqueness of vision, exceptional draughtsmanship and a rare ability to produce a drawing or painting where the quality of distinct “otherness” is so pronounced you can’t help but feel that the image of something genuinely non-human had been captured on paper or board. Spare suffered by falling out of fashion and by not being attached to any trend other than the vague Symbolist style he began with. The qualities for which we value him now could be connected to voguish occultism prior to the First World War but as the century progressed only Surrealism would have had any time for his unique imagination. Had his work been shown at the London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 his fortunes might have been different but by this time he had turned his back on an indifferent art world, concerning himself with his private work and studies while sketching his South London neighbours to make money.

Happily a cottage industry has emerged devoted to keeping his works in print, Fulgur Limited having produced some handsome editions with excellent reproductions. However, this still tends to limit his work to aficionados. Fifty years after his death I’d much prefer to see Taschen produce an introduction to his work for a wider audience. Genuine vision is always in demand, whatever age it comes from.

* High Art and Low Life: ‘The Studio’ and the fin de siècle (1993).