Lynd Ward – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 29

A Folies Bergère dancer, c. 1909.

• Six Novels in Woodcuts: The Library of America publishes a boxed set of Lynd Ward’s works: Gods’ Man, Madman’s Drum, Wild Pilgrimage, Prelude to a Million Years, Song Without Words and Vertigo.

• RIP ace graphic designer Raymond Hawkey. Related: Raymond Hawkey: An eye for detail, and Hawkey’s James Bond cover designs from the mid-60s.

• The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, an exhibition at Duke University, North Carolina, features work by 41 artists from around the world, from the 1960s to the present, using vinyl records as subject or medium.

The Île de la Cité, a steel engraving by Albert Decaris (1950).

• Fred Tomaselli will have a new exhibition of his work at the Brooklyn Museum next month.

• Socialist Monuments in Bulgaria photographed by Linda Ferrari.

• What would Howard think of the Mythos Art Dildo?

• Space is Process, a film about Olafur Eliasson.

• Thurston Moore’s Indie Books.

• Chris Colfer in a leather bar.

• Ephemeral New York.

• Chrome! Helios Creed’s YouTube channel.

Cain’s son: the incarnations of Grendel

Beowulf wrestles with Grendel, Lynd Ward (1939).

There’s nothing new in pointing out Hollywood’s crimes against literature, the film business has been screwing up book adaptation since the earliest days of silent cinema. But sometimes the wound is so grievous you can’t help but speak out, in this case against Roger Avary’s Beowulf which is released next month. This is another CGI-heavy confection along the lines Polar Express, with the actors being given digital bodies via motion-capture, and it’s something I’d probably have ignored until I saw this picture of Grendel, the story’s principal monster. Beowulf is one of the earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon poems and Grendel, the bloodthirsty creature which Beowulf battles, is one of the ur-fiends of English literature, along with his equally monstrous, lake-dwelling mother and the dragon which fatally wounds the hero. The trio give us a peek back into the dark imagination from a time before recorded history and Grendel especially has always had something raw and primal about its character. So when you see a beast with such a history portrayed as little more than a diseased muppet you wonder what’s going on. Are the creators inept? Ignorant? Were studio restrictions at work? How does an industry with the talent to give splendid life to the trolls and Balrog of Lord of the Rings, or Davy Jones and crew in Pirates of the Caribbean, screw up so badly?

Continue reading “Cain’s son: the incarnations of Grendel”

Gods’ Man by Lynd Ward

I’ve never tried woodcut engaving—the closest was scraperboard and some linocuts when I was a teenager—but I’ve always admired the form and Lynd Ward (1905–1985) was one of its masters. Ward’s wordless “novels” were inspired by the similar work of Frans Masereel and you can see pages from two of these, Gods’ Man (1930) and Madman’s Drum (1930) at The Visual Telling of Stories. Ward’s work is frequently referred to as an inspiration by later illustrators, and comic artists especially have responded to these pictorial narratives. Woodcut illustration had a resurgence of popularity before and after the Second World War; most of MC Escher‘s early work is woodcut engraving, for instance. There are still a few contemporary practitioners, Clifford Harper being one of the most visible in the UK.

• Bud Plant’s Lynd Ward page
• A Lynd Ward site with examples from other books

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