L’Oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l’infini from A Edgar Poe (1882).

Another decently thorough Symbolist website covers the life and work of Odilon Redon (1840–1916), an artist whose pastels and prints were strange even by the standards of his contemporaries. His giant eyeballs and other floating figures are always startling and point the way inevitably to Surrealism, especially in dream lithographs like the one below.

Vision from Dans le Rêve (1879).

I compounded that Symbolist/Surrealist association when I was drawing The Call of Cthulhu in 1987 by showing Ardois-Boonot’s Dream Landscape (which Lovecraft doesn’t describe beyond the word “blasphemous”) as being a Max Ernst-style frottage canvas with a Redon eye rising from the murk. Cthulhu’s presence reduced to a single ocular motif like the eye of Sauron.

The Call of Cthulhu (1988).

And while we’re on the subject there’s Guy Maddin’s typically phantasmic short, Odilon Redon or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity made for the BBC in 1995. Ostensibly based on the balloon picture above, this manages to reference a host of other Redon lithographs and charcoal drawings in the space of four-and-a-half minutes. Sublimely weird and weirdly sublime.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arthur Zaidenberg’s À Rebours
• The Heart of the World

“It had not been able to support the dazzling splendour imposed on it…”

It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book.

The corrupting French novel which Lord Henry Wotton gives to Dorian Gray is never named by Oscar Wilde but its identity is no secret. À Rebours (Against Nature) by Joris-Karl Huymans was published in 1884 and Wilde, Whistler and others were immediately impressed by what amounts to a manual for the lifestyle of a Decadent Aesthete. Wilde fell sufficiently under its spell to have Dorian Gray in the later chapters of his own novel indulge his senses much like Huysmans’ protagonist, Des Esseintes; where Des Esseintes grows poisonous blooms and fills his room with exotic perfumes, Dorian Gray luxuriates over a hoard of precious stones.

À Rebours features lengthy descriptions of Symbolist art, with particular attention given to Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon. Yet despite the visual description Arthur Zaidenberg’s illustrations are the only ones I’ve come across to date. The book may be influential but it seems too obscure to have attracted illustrators. Zaidenberg’s drawings from a 1931 edition are executed in a woodcut style not far removed from Frans Masereel’s earlier work in books such as Die Stadt (1925), and as such the style is fashionably spare, not necessarily the right choice for a work concerned with sensory delirium. (This Zaidenberg street scene from 1937 shows a definite Masereel influence.) I’d much rather have seen Harry Clarke illustrate Huysmans. Zaidenberg’s drawings are also curious for their foregrounding of the sexual content which makes me think this edition may have been sold on the basis of a salacious reputation. The scene below, for example, doesn’t occur in the novel but can be implied from the description of Des Esseintes meeting a schoolboy in the Avenue de Latour-Maubourg.

“Never had he experienced a more alluring relationship.”

The complete (?) set of Zaidenberg’s illustrations can be seen here. Pages from a later artists’ manual, Anyone Can Draw, are at VTS.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Osborne’s Dorian Gray
• Because Wilde’s worth it
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Dorian Gray revisited
• Frans Masereel’s city
• The Poet and the Pope
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II

In honour of the great news that a print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has been discovered containing scenes long-believed to have been lost, here’s a link to my favourite Guy Maddin film, The Heart of the World. Maddin’s short is six minutes of frenetic genius which references Metropolis in passing although it owes far more to Expressionist cinema and the avant garde propaganda works of Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and others. I like Maddin’s films a lot, especially the luxuriantly camp Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, but sometimes his eccentricities can be overbearing at feature length. Heart of the World by contrast is just perfect.

YouTube has a few other Maddin shorts including his BBC-commissioned The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (1995), based on a picture by Symbolist artist Odilon Redon. Also the long version of Sissy Boy Slap Party from the same year, which comes across as a crazy blend of South Pacific outtakes, Fassinbinder’s Querelle and Martin Denny exotica, in a style as frenetic as Heart of the World. Hilarious and homoerotic in equal measure.

• I cast Ann Savage as my mother | Guy Maddin on his new film, My Winnepeg

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exotica!
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• Metropolis posters

Previous posts about fantastic, surreal or visionary artists.

• The art of Oleg Denysenko

• The art of François Schuiten

• The eyes of Odilon Redon

• Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists

• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009

• The art of Boris Indrikov

• The art of Mati Klarwein, 1932–2002

• The art of Pierre Clayette, 1930–2005

• The monstrous tome

• A Midsummer Night’s Dadd

• The art of Ian Miller

• The art of Leonor Fini, 1907–1996

• The art of Michel Henricot

• The art of Heidi Taillefer

• Set in Stone

• Against Nature: The hybrid forms of modern sculpture

• The art of Jean-Paul Faccon

• The art of Andrew Severynko

• The Hound of Heaven by RH Ives Gammell

• The art of Jean Carriès, 1855–1894

• Visions and the art of Nick Hyde

• The art of Julie Heffernan

• Custom creatures

• The art of Harold Hitchcock

• The art of Agostino Arrivabene

• The art of Takato Yamamoto

• The art of NoBeast

• A Madmen’s Museum

• The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949

• Imaginary maps by Francesca Berrini

• The art of Jacques Sultana

• Fantastic art from Pan Books

• The art of Jean Benoît

• The art of Bertrand

• Pierre Matter’s cyborg sculpture

• The art of José Hernández

• Czanara’s Hermaphrodite Angel

• The art of Sergei Aparin

• The art of Nicola Verlato

• The art of Stephen Aldrich

• The art of Rudolf Hausner, 1914–1995

• The art of Erik Desmazières

• The Codex Seraphinianus

• Surrealist women

• Leonora Carrington

• Two American paintings

• The art of Thomas Häfner, 1928–1985

• The art of Jean Louis Ricaud

• The art of Gérard Trignac

• The Museum of Fantastic Specimens

• The art of Franz Xavier Messerschmidt, 1736–1783

• The art of Ernst Fuchs

• The art of Jean-Marie Poumeyrol

• Las Pozas and Edward James

• The art of Jean-Pierre Ugarte

• The art of Ljuba Popovic

• The art of Stanislav Szukalski, 1893–1987

More archive pages:
• The archive page archive

Latest book purchase is this large format volume from 1972, one of a number of interesting art books produced by Academy Editions in the early seventies. I also have their monographs on Odilon Redon, “insane” painter Richard Dadd, and their collection of Félicien Rops‘ pornographic and “Satanist” drawings which remains one of the few Rops books published in English.

Through the Looking-Glass by Mervyn Peake (Allen Wingate, London, 1954).

This collection is worth seeking out if you’re interested in minor Victorian and Edwardian illustrators. The book goes through each chapter of the Alice stories showing examples of illustrated editions by a wide range of illustrators and artists, from Lewis Carroll’s original drawings, Tenniel’s inimitable renderings, then on through the twentieth century, featuring artists such as Peter Blake, Ralph Steadman and even a picture by Max Ernst. The cover drawing is one of my favourites, from Charles Robinson, brother of the more famous William Heath. I also like the pictures by the great Mervyn Peake, one of the few illustrators who seemed able to overcome Tenniel’s dominance and show us something new.

The Alice books are one of the great “standards” (in the jazz sense) of illustration although I can’t say I’ve ever felt the temptation to approach them myself. Loathsome monstrosities from hideously-angled dimensions beyond space and time, yes; small Victorian girls and white rabbits, no.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive