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The art of Justin Todd

I was pleased to find a copy of this book recently, a slim volume published in 1978 which isn’t especially rare but which usually sells for much more than the £2 I paid for it. Justin Todd is a British illustrator whose work was a familiar sight on book covers in the 1970s, especially when his commissions weren’t restricted to a single genre. Cover artists who work on fantasy novels are often asked to do horror covers (and vice versa), or edged towards science fiction when the material suits their style; Todd worked on fantasy, horror and the occasional SF title while also providing covers for mainstream novels, offbeat non-fiction, historical fiction and children’s stories. Fully-illustrated children’s books evidently became his main line of work in the 1980s—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, a collaboration with Angela Carter—which would have left him no time for cover commissions. I was amused to find him illustrating crank titles (previously) in the early 70s when he did the paperback cover for one of the great anti-crank books, John Sladek’s The New Apocrypha, a few years later.

The Centre of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space (1972) by John C. Lilly.

Todd’s style is easy to recognise once you’ve seen a few examples: meticulous gouache renderings that tend to be slightly naive even when they’re depicting a wholly realistic story like Treasure Island. Gouache is a water-based paint that’s useful when you want a flat, even finish, but it doesn’t give you the depth of colour or contrast provided by oils or acrylics. Todd’s paintings embrace the limitations of the medium, with gradients and shadings that are so soft and diffused they might be taken at first for pencil drawings.

The Journey to the East (1972) by Herman Hesse.

The Magical Paintings of Justin Todd isn’t a comprehensive study of Todd’s illustration work, more a snapshot of a career in progress. In addition to 64 full-page reproductions there’s a two-page interview by editor and art director Mike Dempsey which provides valuable biographical details. I was pleased to find that many of the cover paintings were ones I hadn’t seen before, including a few Arcimboldo-like faces. Todd had a flair for this kind of visual invention, constructing faces or even whole figures out of disparate objects. I’ve had a copy of The Journey to the East for many years but until this week I don’t think I’d ever looked closely at all the tiny figures making up the central figure that strides across the landscape.

Mike Dempsey maintains a blog which includes a reminiscence of working with Justin Todd.

Stories of Five Decades (1972) by Herman Hesse.

Secret Places of the Lion (1973) by George Hunt Williamson.

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Sanquirico’s theatrical settings

Work-related research over the past couple of weeks has had me looking for pictures of theatres in the 19th century, especially backstage views. The latter proved harder to find than I expected although I did turn up a few useful reference images after scouring the picture libraries. Nuova raccolta di scene teatrali (1828) by Alessandro Sanquirico is an Italian book that surfaced during the searches, not something I wanted but it’s another collection of imaginary architectural views which I always like to see. Sanquirico was set designer for La Scala in Milan so most of these designs are for opera sets, although several are labelled “ballo“, a type of theatrical dance which evidently required dramatic settings. As to the designs, there’s more variety than you find among earlier generations of theatrical designers like the Bibienas, a family of artists who specialised in very detailed Baroque interiors. The Romantic era demanded tempestuous drama and greater spectacle, hence Sanquirico’s views of castles, caves, prisons, conflagrations and fanciful depictions of the ancient world. The selection that follows is only a small sample; the book has 242 plates in all.

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Weekend links 783

An illustration by William Heath Robinson for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1914).

• New music: How To Shoulder The Radiance Of Revelations by Dadub; Leviathan by Stephen Roddy; and Echoes Of The Hollow Earth by Cryo Chamber.

• At Sight & Sound: “Every time I look at the film, it gets better.” Stephen Soderbergh on Jaws.

• At Public Domain Review: The Language of Form: Lothar Schreyer’s Kreuzigung (1920).

Leafing through the merveilleux-scientifique novels today allows for a dual rediscovery: firstly, it uncovers the previously unrecognised richness of Belle Époque scientific fiction, which did not perish with the works of Verne. The stories take in journeys to Mars, solar cataclysms, reading of auras, psychic control, weighing of souls, death rays, alien invasions, even strolls among the infinitesimally small. But exploring the genre also offers insights into the cultural history of the era, marked by a significant permeability between science and pseudo-science. Reading this work, we can learn a lot about the aspirations, fears and beliefs of early 20th-century Europe.

Fleur Hopkins-Loféron on the evolution of French science fiction after Jules Verne

• Mix of the week: A Twin Peaks mix for The Wire by Lori Eschler & Dean Hurley.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Kefir.

• Patrick Wolf’s favourite albums.

• ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

• Frou-Frou Foxes In Midsummer Fires (1990) by Cocteau Twins | Midsummer Night (2010) by The Time And Space Machine | Midsummer Boulevard (2022) by Hawksmoor

Armand Rassenfosse’s Fleurs du Mal

It’s been a while since I found another illustrated edition of Baudelaire’s poems but there are still more of them out there. This surprises me a little considering the nature of Baudelaire’s writing, you can’t imagine Anglophone fin-de-siècle publishers lavishing such attention on poems which are morbid and erotic to this degree. Beresford Egan illustrated an edition of Les Fleurs du Mal but this was published in 1929 by which time Continental decadence was regarded in a more favourable light.

Armand Rassenfosse (1862–1934) was a Belgian artist whose 1899 edition of Baudelaire is what the French would call the artist’s chef d’oeuvre, a limited reprint of Les Fleurs du Mal illustrated with colour etchings on nearly every page. Rassenfosse’s approach is much more Symbolist in tone than the near pornography of Manuel Orazi, presenting a succession of idealised figures (naked women for the most part) in nebulous spaces. I was hoping he might have produced more in this style but his other work tends to be poster design and painted studies of female dancers in various states of undress.

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Parade de Satie

The first chimes of a period which began in 1912 and will only end with my death, were rung for me by Diaghilev, one night in the Place de la Concorde. We were going home, having had supper after the show. Nijinsky was sulking as usual. He was walking ahead of us. Diaghilev was scoffing at my absurdities. When I questioned him about his moderation (I was used to praise), he stopped, adjusted his eyeglass and said: ‘Astonish me.’ The idea of surprise, so enchanting in Apollinaire, had never occurred to me.

In 1917, the evening of the first performance of Parade, I did astonish him.

This very brave man listened, white as a sheet, to the fury of the house. He was frightened. He had reason to be. Picasso, Satie and I were unable to get back to the wings. The crowd recognized and threatened us. Without Apollinaire, his uniform and the bandage round his head, women armed with pins would have put out our eyes.

Jean Cocteau (again), writing in The Difficulty of Being about the opening night of Parade, the “ballet réaliste” he created for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Erik Satie wrote the music, Léonide Massine choreographed the dance, and Pablo Picasso designed the costumes and decor, with assistance from Giacomo Balla, one of the Italian Futurists. The reception for Parade wasn’t as thoroughly hostile as that received by Le Sacre du Printemps a few years earlier but there was bait enough for the reactionaries, with ragtime quotes in the dance and the music, and an everyday setting in which a group of street performers attempt to summon a crowd to see their show. Other details were overtly avant-garde: some of Picasso’s costumes were more like wearable cardboard sculptures, while Cocteau further antagonised the audience (and the composer) by adding the sounds of a typewriter, siren, pistol and steamship whistle to the music. The most significant response came from Apollinaire when he described the ballet in the programme notes as “une sorte de surréalisme“, giving the world a new word which we still use today.

Parade de Satie by Koji Yamamura is an animated presentation of Satie’s music which sees the characters from the ballet—a Chinese magician, a small American girl, the acrobats, a pantomime horse—jumping and dancing around the screen while Satie, Picasso and Cocteau observe the proceedings. It’s a lively and witty film, probably more lively than the ballet itself when the hand-drawn performers are less encumbered by gravity or their unwieldy outfits. Yamamura has directed a single animated feature, Dozens of Norths, and many more shorts like Parade de Satie, including films based on a story by Franz Kafka (A Country Doctor) and the life of Eadweard Muybridge (Muybridge’s Strings). Being a pioneer of motion photography and inventor of the Zoopraxiscope, Muybridge is an attractive subject for animators. The naked figures from his studies of human and animal motion turn up in Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations, while Gérald Frydman directed a short biographical film about Muybridge, Le Cheval de Fer, in 1984.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jean Cocteau: Autoportrait d’un inconnu
• Orphée posters
• Cocteau and Lovecraft
• Cocteau drawings
• Querelle de Brest
• Halsman and Cocteau
• La Belle et la Bête posters
• The writhing on the wall
• Le livre blanc by Jean Cocteau
• Cocteau’s sword
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• Cocteau at the Louvre des Antiquaires
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau