{architecture} – Page 5 – { feuilleton }

Fantasie di architettura by Aldo Avati

Giving a small collection of architectural designs the label “fantasies” seems an odd thing when so many building designs don’t go further than the planning stage: Frank Lloyd Wright’s mile-high skyscraper is as much a fantasy as the unbuilt towers of London or any of the losing designs from the world’s many architectural competitions. Fantasie di architettura: schizze e prospettive (1920) is a portfolio of 60 plates by Aldo Avati, an architect and stage designer from Bologna whose designs are more fanciful than overtly fantastic. The introductory note refers to “the magician Piranesi” whose architectural caprices, especially his Carceri d’Invenzione, cast long shadows across all the arts. Piranesi’s influence is certainly evident here, in the views through huge ramparts and stone arches, the flights of stairs and dramatic lighting. Some of the views wouldn’t be out of place in this collection of drawings and paintings by an earlier generation of Italian stage designers.

Note: Although the book is titled “Part One” there doesn’t seem to have been a part two.

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The Twilight Magus

Presenting my latest cover for Aconyte’s Arkham Horror line, and the third and final book in a trilogy by Tim Pratt.

Carl Sanford, once the Silver Twilight Lodge’s great leader and now presumed dead, lives in anonymity in Spain, plotting revenge against those who betrayed him. Alone, he calculates his first move to achieve power abroad is by being initiated into the mysterious ancient society called the Red Coterie to secretly take it over. Despite Sanford’s reputation, the Red Coterie demands proof of his occult prowess, sending him on a quest to vanquish The Blood Moon, a reclusive blood magus manipulating humans and monsters alike to achieve their own ends. As Sanford uses every scrap of cunning he possesses to outwit his enemies and prove his worth, old foes from Arkham have discovered his existence and are coming to finish him off once and for all.

The brief for this one was for a design that would continue the form of the previous two volumes while incorporating details of Antoni Gaudí’s architecture, Barcelona being one of the story’s locations. I’ve admired Gaudí’s architecture for a long time but I’ve never had the opportunity to use any of it in an illustration before. Most of the details are tiny ones but the unfinished porch of the Sagrada Família is recognisable, as is the iron dragon from the entrance gate of the Park Güell. The windows behind Sarah van Shaw and Carl Sanford are also Gaudí designs.

Less recognisable, but also a Gaudí creation, is the background pattern which is more visible on the back cover of the book. My previous covers for Aconyte have all used Art Deco mofits to complement stories set in the 1920s, with several of them having elaborate background patterns. The Gaudí design was one I hadn’t seen before, a hexagonal tile in which portions of three organic forms—starfish, ammonite and algae—become whole when the tiles are placed together. It’s a beautifully simple and clever design with the additional bonus for this cover of creating a series of spirals and tendrils which suit the Lovecraftian nature of the story. If you search around you’ll find a number of places selling reproductions as either ceramic tiles or coasters in a variety of materials.

The Twilight Magus will be published in July.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Weekend links 777

The Seven Wonders of the World (1886). 1: Lighthouse on the Island of Pharos, Alexandria; 2: Statue of the Olympian Jupiter; 3: The Colossus at Rhodes; 4: The Temple of Diana at Ephesus; 5: The Mausoleum of Artemisia; 6: The Pyramids of Egypt; 7: The Walls and Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

• “The space of possible languages is vast, and full of exotic languages that are much weirder and stranger than any we have yet imagined.” Nikhil Mahant on the many possible forms of alien language.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (translated by Basil Creighton).

• At Alan Moore World: A new interview with Mr Moore about Long London, magic and the future of humanity.

• New music: The Reverent Sky by Steve Roach; and Contrary Motion by Scanner & Nurse With Wound.

• At Public Domain Review: Tangled Dürer: The Six Knots (ca. before 1521).

• At The Daily Heller: A Typographer’s Mother Goose by Louise Fili.

• At Colossal: Woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jud Yalkut’s Day.

• The Strange World of…Steve Aylett.

• Seven And Seven Is (1966) by Love | Seven By Seven (1973) by Hawkwind | Seven, Seven, Seven (1995) by Money Mark

Weekend links 773

The Tower of Babel from Turris Babel (1679) by Athanasius Kircher, showing how wide the Tower would have to be at its base to reach the Moon.

• The week’s literary resurrection: Penguin announced Shadow Ticket, a new novel by Thomas Pynchon. “Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering…”

• The week’s musical resurrection: Stereolab announced Instant Holograms On Metal Film, their first new album since Not Music in 2010. Aerial Troubles is the new single with a video which has prompted complaints in the comments about the use of AI treatments for the visuals.

• At Public Domain Review: Modern Babylon: Ziggurat Skyscrapers and Hugh Ferriss’ Retrofuturism, a long read by Eva Miller. Previously: The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferriss.

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: Ben Wickey is selling some of the original art from his Lives of the Great Enchanters pages.

• At Wormwoodiana: The Golden Age of Second-Hand Bookshops is now. Mark Valentine explains.

• “Alvin Lucier is still making music four years after his death – thanks to an artificial brain.”

• At Colossal: Hundreds of fantastic creatures inhabit a sprawling universe by Vorja Sánchez.

• Coming soon from Radiance Films: A blu-ray disc of Essential Polish Animation.

• Pattern design and illustration by Gail Myerscough.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Homage Script.

• New music: Sabi by Odalie.

• RIP Max Romeo.

• Babylon (1968) by Dr John | War In A Babylon It Sipple Out Deh (1976) by Max Romeo | Babylonian Tower (1982) by Minimal Compact

Minotaure, 1933–1939

Art by Diego Rivera for the Mexican supplement in Minotaure no. 13.

I was tempted to title this one Minotaure! since I’ve been searching for copies of the magazine in question for many years. I’m certain I went looking in all the usual sources last year in the run-up to the Surrealist centenary, without success. Anyway, here they all are at last, a complete run of one of the major Surrealist periodicals.

Minotaure was notable for a number of reasons, first among them the publisher, Albert Skira, whose resources enabled the production of a very desirable item, with good design, colour prints in each issue, and plenty of photos and other artwork throughout. The Surrealist publications of the 1920s had been historically important but all of them were monochrome documents with few pictures and few pages. Minotaure had the production values of a quality magazine and an impressive roster of artists and writers to fill each issue. Skira and editor E. Tériade originally intended their periodical to cover a wide range of art, past and present, but with most of the early contributors being members of André Breton’s Surrealist circle the magazine quickly became a showcase for Surrealist art and theorising. The first issue featured a cover by Pablo Picasso, with more Picasso artwork inside. Subsequent issues had covers by leading Surrealist artists–Dalí, Ernst, Magritte, Masson–which captured the movement at a time before Breton’s persistent expulsions hollowed out the original group. Breton writes in nearly all the issues but was forbidden from using Minotaure as a political platform (the previous Surrealist journal had been the very political Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution), a restriction he kept to. His manner was often dictatorial but he always had an eye for the main chance, or the bonne chance in this case.

The written contents of Minotaure are mostly in French but the pictorial matter is worth seeing even if much of it is very familiar today. Among the written highlights are two essays by Salvador Dalí, the first on the “edible” nature of Art Nouveau architecture, with an emphasis on the work of Gaudí; the second about Pre-Raphaelite painting. It’s understandable that Dalí would be attracted by the meticulous realism of early Millais and William Holman Hunt but I didn’t know his essay included an analysis of Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd, a painting I look at every time I’m in the Manchester Art Gallery. Elsewhere there are articles about automatism, mediumship, the decalcomania technique in painting, the esoteric symbolism of the alchemists, naive or untutored art, and plenty of single-page items and visual novelties. Photography by Man Ray and Brassaï is a recurrent feature. Skira’s magazine established a template which the two American Surrealist periodicals of the 1940s, View and VVV, did their best to follow. Now that Minotaure is freely available I’ll be waiting impatiently for complete runs of its followers to turn up somewhere.

(Note: some of the copies linked below have had their colour prints removed.)

Minotaure no. 1 (1933)