Kenneth Anger, Topanga Canyon, California, Composite (1954).

This portrait of a dashing Kenneth Anger juxtaposes the filmmaker with an engraving by Gustave Doré for Paradise Lost. Like his contemporary Emil Cadoo, photographer Edmund Teske (1911–1996) often concealed the homoerotic nature of his pictures by rendering them “artistic” through double-exposure. Teske was friends with rock group The Doors, and a number of his studies of Jim Morrison and co. are very familiar from histories of the band.

Via Bajo el Signo de Libra.

Nude, Davenport, Iowa, Composite with Leaves (1941/46).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Emil Cadoo
• The art of Robert Flynt

Looking at Willy Pogàny’s work last week I was reminded that as well as illustrating books he worked in Hollywood for a while as an art director and set designer. Among those jobs was a credit for “Technical staff” on the only film for which director Harry Lachman is remembered today, a curious 1935 melodrama, Dante’s Inferno. This stars Spencer Tracy as a fairground barker whose talent for drawing an audience helps an old showman boost the attendance at his moralising “Dante’s Inferno” attraction.

Entrance to the fairground attraction.

A hubristic rise and fall follows for Tracy, and the film spends much of its running time in routine business and family scenes. What sets it apart is some striking fairground designs (no doubt Pogàny’s involvement) and a truly startling self-contained sequence when the old showman describes for Tracy the true nature of the Inferno. This sequence takes Gustave Doré’s celebrated illustrations and brings them to life in a series of atmospheric tableaux which even manage to contain brief glimpses of nudity. Hell, it seems, is the one place you can get away with not wearing any clothes. I’ve read many times that this sequence was borrowed from an earlier silent film, also called Dante’s Inferno, but have yet to come across any definite confirmation. It’s certainly possible since studios at that time treated other films in a very cavalier fashion; when a film was remade the studio would try to buy up and destroy prints of the earlier film. If anyone can point to more information about the origin of the Hell sequence, please leave a comment.

Stone tombs from the Inferno sequence.

If the Inferno sequence wasn’t already stolen in 1935, it works so well that it’s been plundered many times since; Kenneth Anger borrowed shots which he mixed into Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Derek Jarman did the same for TG: Psychick Rally in Heaven (1981), and Ken Russell slipped some tinted scenes into Altered States (1980). I tinted the entire sequence red and dumped it into the one-off video accompaniment I made for Alan Moore and Tim Perkins’ stage performance of Angel Passage in 2001; it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s been used elsewhere. As with many of Hollywood’s products, Lachman’s film pretends to condemn prurience—Tracy’s character exploits Hell’s lurid attractions for gain—while revelling in the opportunity to show as much bare flesh as the censors would allow. As with Doré, Lachman’s Inferno seems populated solely by men and women in the peak of physical fitness.

Inevitably, you can see the Inferno sequence on YouTube here and here. The film doesn’t seem to be available on DVD but it’s worth seeking out to watch in full. In addition to the infernal delights, you also get to see 16-year-old Rita Hayworth’s screen debut as a dancer on a cruise ship.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Willy Pogàny’s Lohengrin
• Willy Pogàny’s Parsifal
• Maps of the Inferno
• A TV Dante by Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway
• The art of Lucio Bubacco
• The last circle of the Inferno
• Angels 4: Fallen angels

Poe by Harry Clarke.

Happy birthday Edgar Allan Poe, born two hundred years ago today. I nearly missed this anniversary after a busy weekend. Rather than add to the mountain of praise for the writer, I thought I’d list some favourites among the numerous Poe-derived works in different media.

Illustrated books
For me the Harry Clarke edition of 1919 (later reworked with colour plates) has always been definitive. Many first-class artists have tried their hand at depicting Poe’s stories and poems, among them Aubrey Beardsley, Gustave Doré, Arthur Rackham, W Heath Robinson and Edmund Dulac; none complements the morbid atmosphere and florid prose as well as Clarke does. And if it’s horror you need, Clarke’s depiction of The Premature Burial could scarcely be improved upon.

Honourable mention should be made of two less well-known works, Wilfried Sätty’s The Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe (1976) and Visions of Poe (1988) by Simon Marsden. I wrote about Sätty’s collage engravings in Strange Attractor 2, and Sätty’s style was eminently suited to Poe’s work. Marsden’s photographs of old castles and decaying mansions are justly celebrated but in book form often seem in search of a subject beyond a general Gothic spookiness or a recounting of spectral anecdotes. His selection of Poe stories and poems is a great match for the photos, one of which, a view of Monument Valley for The Colloquy of Monos and Una, was also used on a Picador cover for Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

Recordings
These are legion but among the outstanding one-off tracks I’d note two poems set to music, Dream Within a Dream from Propaganda’s 1985 album, A Secret Wish, and The Lake by Antony & The Johnsons. The latter appeared on the landmark Golden Apples of the Sun compilation and also on Antony’s own The Lake EP.

Among the full-length works, Hal Willner’s 1997 2-CD collection Closed on Account of Rabies features lengthy readings set to music from a typically eclectic Willner line-up: Marianne Faithfull, Christopher Walken, Iggy Pop, Diamanda Galás, Gavin Friday, Dr John, Deborah Harry, Jeff Buckley (one of the last recordings before his untimely death) and Gabriel Byrne. Byrne’s reading of The Masque of the Red Death is tremendous and the whole package is decked out in Ralph Steadman graphics.

Antony Hegarty appears again on another double-disc set, Lou Reed’s The Raven (2003), a very eccentric approach to Poe which I suspect I’m in the minority in enjoying as much as I do. An uneven mix of songs and reading/performances, Reed updates some Poe poems while others are presented straight and to often stunning effect by (among others) Willem Defoe, Steve Buscemi, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Amanda Plummer and Elizabeth Ashley.

Films
Once again, there’s too many films but The Masque of the Red Death (1964) has always been my favourite of the Roger Corman adaptations, not least for the presence of Jane Asher, Patrick Magee and (behind the camera) Nicolas Roeg. I wrote last May about the animated version of The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA. That adaptation, with narration by James Mason, is still on YouTube so if you haven’t seen it yet you can celebrate Poe’s anniversary by watching it right now.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA
• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

Pandemonium by John Martin (1841).

Happy birthday to John Milton, 400-years-old today.

“High on a throne of a royal state, which far / Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind” by Gustave Doré (1866).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Chiaroscuro II: Joseph Wright of Derby, 1734–1797
• Angels 4: Fallen angels
• Death from above
• The apocalyptic art of Francis Danby

A recent conversation with Evan J Peterson touched on the subject of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Evan is currently working on something based on the novel and—in the interests of disclosure—he wrote a very flattering piece about these pages recently. In addition to this, Peter Ackroyd’s latest book works his familiar intertextual games with the same story, placing the monster creator in London where he meets various significant literary types. Andrew Motion reviewed the latter this week and wasn’t impressed.

Which preamble brings us to Bernie Wrightson’s treatment of the story and a work which was a major inspiration for my HP Lovecraft comics and illustrations. Wrightson’s illustrated edition of Shelley’s complete novel was published in 1983 with an introduction by Stephen King. I’d admired Wrightson’s technique for years but wasn’t always impressed by his subject matter which tended to revolve around the stock selection of favourite American horror characters—vampires, werewolves, zombies and so on—while much of his early art was indebted to the EC horror comics which never interested me at all. Jokey horror has always seemed to me a debased and neutered horror, horror-lite, and yes, that includes plush Cthulhus and the rest of that tat.

So the immediate attraction of the Frankenstein book was seeing Wrightson take the story back to its origins and treat it seriously. Frankenstein—creator, monster and myth—has been subject to as much degradation as Dracula over the past century which made Wrightson’s approach very welcome. Crucially, it also gave me the key to interpreting Lovecraft visually. It was very evident that his drawings owed a debt to a favourite illustrator of mine, Gustave Doré; two of the pieces were almost straight copies of Doré drawings from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In terms of overt influence, Wrightson’s book is dedicated to the great Roy G Krenkel, one of the finest fantasy illustrators of the early 20th century. I wasn’t aware of it at the time but Wrightson’s style here also owes much to American illustrator Franklin Booth (1874–1948), one of Krenkel’s own influences. If the monster in his drawings had a touch of the lumbering EC zombie about its features that was allowable given the other influences at work, and besides, his compositions are perfect. Once I started work on my Lovecraft drawings I quickly found an approach that suited my own obsessions with fine line and detail. But it was Wrightson’s example which pointed the way.

The only problem discussing this is that the copies available on various sites, including Wrightson’s own gallery pages, don’t do the drawings much justice at all. (There’s a large copy of one picture here.) Where the more detailed pieces are concerned you’ll have to try and find a copy of the book. This year is the 25th anniversary of the book’s publication so Dark Horse Comics will be publishing a hard cover edition in October 2008. In addition, Darkwoods Press have announced an “ultimate edition” which will reprint all the artwork (some drawings weren’t used) with quality reproduction. No further information about that, however, and given that they’ve having to source all of the original drawings it may be a while before it appears.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bernie Wrightson in The Mist
• The monstrous tome
• Franklin Booth’s Flying Islands

Nocturne (aquatint; no date).

One of Callum’s recent book postings alerted me to the work of Stella Langdale, an artist and illustrator I hadn’t come across before. Judging from online listings her obscurity would seem to be a result of not having being as productive as some of her contemporaries, and her drawings are a deal more gloomier than the delicate pen-and-ink style that was common in book illustration at the time. But it’s her brooding charcoal masses which I find appealing. As with the better Gustave Doré illustrations, they adumbrate more than they depict by the use of careful composition. Some of her other works are aquatints, a form of etching which allows for similar effects to the graded atmospheres of charcoal.

Three of Langdale’s illustrated books have religious themes, The Dream of Gerontius (1916) by Cardinal Newman, Christ in Hades (1917) by Stephen Phillips and The Hound of Heaven (1922) by Francis Thompson. There’s nothing insipid about these renderings, however, some of her views of Hell give Doré a run for his money while the jagged lightning in one of the pictures below looks like a nod back to the apocalyptic visions of John Martin. Other illustrated works included The Little House (1920) by Coningsby Dawson and illustrations for the legend of King Arthur.

The Dream of Gerontius: “I went to sleep”.

The Dream of Gerontius: “Then I was sent from Heaven”.

The Dream of Gerontius: “Take me away . . .”.

Christ in Hades:

“Dreadful suspended business, and vast life
Pausing, dismantled piers, and naked frames.
And further, shapes from obscure troubles loosed,
Like mist descended.”

Christ in Hades:

“To see these nations burning run through Hell,
Magnificently anguished, by the grave
Untired; and this last March against the Powers.”

Christ in Hades:

“Half in the shining sun upright, and half
Reposing in the shadow.”

• A Stella Langdale biography
(Note: the 1880–1976 dates for the artist are given in a list of works on the site above. There’s some confusion about this, however, since the biography page says she died in the 1950s.)
• The Dream of Gerontius at The Victorian Web
• A PDF version of Christ in Hades which includes the illustrations

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

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Death from above
• The apocalyptic art of Francis Danby

Inspiration (1949).

Karel Zemen (1910–1989) is a filmmaker I’m often telling people about but whose work isn’t easy to see. So it’s good to find that YouTube has gained some clips of his animations and examples of the partly-animated adventure films he made in the Fifties and Sixties. Zeman was yet another great Czech animator and the YouTube collection includes his most celebrated short, Inspiration, which gave life to glass figurines, an unyielding medium that he moves as expressively as if it was clay or plasticine.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1961).

The adventure films are predominantly based on Jules Verne and place live actors into animated settings, many of which are taken directly from (or intended to imitate) the engraved illustrations of the original novels. The animation enabled Zeman to fill his films with dirigibles, submarines and various steam contraptions which would be too expensive to create otherwise. Zeman’s The Fabulous Baron Munchausen took the Gustave Doré illustrations for its visual style which is something this particular Doré fan appreciates, and the film is closer to the spirit of the Raspe novel than the Nazi adaptation of 1943 or Terry Gilliam’s later version. The results are a lot more artificial than the seamless blend of animation and live action attempted by Ray Harryhausen in his own Jules Verne film, Mysterious Island, but the artificiality gives the films a distinctive charm.

• A Deadly Invention aka The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958)
• The Fabulous World of Jules Verne trailer (1958)
• Excerpts from Baron Munchausen (1961)
• The Special Effects of Karel Zeman pt. I | pt. II

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
• Barta’s Golem
• The Hetzel editions of Jules Verne

HP Lovecraft by Virgil Finlay, 1937.

The Kingdom of Evil by Anthony Angarola (1924).

Anthony Angarola
“There’s something those fellows catch—beyond life—that they’re able to make us catch for a second. Doré had it. Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it. And Pickman had it as no man ever had it before or—I hope to heaven—ever will again.” (Pickman’s Model, 1926)

“Sorry to hear that Angarola is dead. He almost illustrated my ‘Outsider’—that is, he read it & told Wright he’d like to illustrate it just after the present illustration had been made & purchased!” (to Richard Ely Morse, 28 July 1932)

Paradise Lost by Gustave Doré (1866).

Gustave Doré
“I began to have nightmares of the most hideous description, peopled with things which I called ‘night-gaunts’—a compound word of my own coinage. I used to draw them after waking (perhaps the idea of these figures came from an edition de luxe of Paradise Lost with illustrations by Doré, which I discovered one day in the east parlour).” (to Rheinhart Kleiner, 16 November 1916)

The Thing on the Doorstep by Virgil Finlay (1933).

Virgil Finlay
“I’ve recently come into touch with Finlay, & find him a most unusual & brilliant character. He’s only 22, & a resident of his native city of Rochester, N.Y. He is a poet of no mean attainments as well as an artist—though of course pictorial art is his primary medium. In future years I feel certain that he will become an artist of distinction, so that the WT group will feel very proud of having known him in his youth…. All of Finlay’s WT work is good—especially the designs for your Lost Paradise & Bloch’s Faceless God. Bloch tells me that Wright considers the latter the finest illustration ever drawn for WT, & that the original hangs framed in the office.” (to Catherine L Moore, mid-October 1936)

“I liked the Finlay illustrations to my two tales—indeed, I believe Finlay is the best all-around artist Weird Tales has ever had. His drawing for the Doorstep was really an imaginative masterpiece. Wright has generously presented me with the originals of both Haunter and Doorstep pictures—and they far transcend the mechanical reproductions.” (to James F Morton, March 1937)

The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli (1791).

Henry Fuseli
“Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches’ Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That’s because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear—the exact sorts of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. I don’t have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely makes us laugh.” (Pickman’s Model, 1926)

Saturn Devouring his Sons by Francisco de Goya (1819).

Francisco de Goya
“Another artist who went even farther than Hogarth in depicting human bestiality is the Spaniard, Goya.” (to William Lumley, 21 December 1931)

Gin Lane by William Hogarth (1751).

William Hogarth
“This antient and pestilential reticulation of crumbling cottages and decaying doorways was like nothing I had ever beheld save in a dream—it was the 18th century of Goya, not of the Georges; of Hogarth, not of Horace Walpole.” (to Maurice W Moe, 24 November 1923)

The Great Day of His Wrath by John Martin (1853).

John Martin
“Under Lovemanic guidance I looked up engravings of his work in the N.Y. Public Library, & was enthralled by the darkly thunderous, apocalyptically majestic, & cataclysmically unearthly power of one who, to me, seemed to hold the essence of cosmic mystery… He was, in a sense, a Milton among painters…. Night; great desolate pillared halls; unholy abysses & blasphemous torrents; terraced titan cities in far, half-celestial backgrounds whereon shines the light of no familiar sky of men’s knowing; shrieking mortal hordes borne downward over vast wastes & down cyclopean gulfs where Phlegethon & Archeron flow; these are the dominant impressions one (i.e., myself, at least!) carries away from the study of a set of Martin engravings.” (to Vincent Starrett, 10 January 1928)

Kanchenjunga by Nicholas Roerich (1936).

Nicholas Roerich
“Merritt has a wide acquaintance among mystical enthusiasts, and is a close friend of old Nicholas Roerich, the Russian painter whose weird Thibetan landscapes I have so long admired.” (to Robert H Barlow, 13 January 1934)

“Better than the surrealists, though, is good old Nick Roerich, whose joint at Riverside Drive and 103rd Street is one of my shrines in the pest zone. There is something in his handling of perspective and atmosphere which to me suggests other dimensions and alien orders of being—or at least, the gateways leading to such. Those fantastic carven stones in lonely upland deserts—those ominous, almost sentient, lines of jagged pinnacles—and above all, those curious cubical edifices clinging to precipitous slopes and edging upward to forbidden needle-like peaks!” (to James F Morton, March 1937)

Mung and the Beast of Mung by Sidney Sime (1905).

Sidney Sime
“Yes—Sime does splendid teamwork with Dunsany, seeming to share his bizarre & individual vision as few could. He is an old man, largely retired from active work, & Dunsany has to prod him considerably to get the few illustrations he wants.” (to Robert H Barlow, 14 March 1933)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Angels 4: Fallen angels
• Death from above
• The apocalyptic art of Francis Danby

The Treasures of Satan by Jean Delville (1894).

Some more favourite paintings today. Jean Delville produced a splendidly strange portrayal of Satan as an undersea monarch lording it over a sprawl of intoxicated, naked figures. When Savoy Books decided to put together the definitive version of David Lindsay’s equally strange fantasy novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, I felt this was the only painting adequate to the task of filling out the cover. That was in 2002; a year later Gollancz used the same painting on the cover of their Fantasy Masterworks paperback edition of the book. Lindsay’s book has been plagued by bad cover art for years so we managed to raise the bar for future editions. Delville was one of the great painters of the Symbolist school, all his work is worth looking at.

There are numerous representations of Lucifer but Franz Stuck’s is especially striking and apparently caused viewers to cross themselves before it when it was first exhibited.

Gustave Doré’s tumbling figure is from his illustrated edition of Paradise Lost, a book full of armour-clad, spiky-winged angels. Some of those wings have even found their way into my work via the miracle of Photoshop.

Lucifer by Franz Stuck (1890).

Paradise Lost by Gustave Doré (1866).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Thomas Häfner, 1928–1985