02024

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The Devil’s Wife and her Eldest (1924) by Harry Clarke.

Happy new year. 02024? Read this.

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L’Inhumaine poster (1924) by Georges Djo-Bourgeois.

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Counter-Composition V (1924) by Theo van Doesburg.

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The Thief of Bagdad poster (1924) by Anton Grot.

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Linea Capricciosa (1924) by Wassily Kandinsky.

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Georges de Feure’s Gate of Dreams

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The gate in question, La Porte des Rêves (1899), is a collection of stories by Symbolist writer Marcel Schwob, illustrated in its first edition by Georges de Feure (1868–1943). The collection is actually a kind of “best of Schwob”, being compiled from stories which had already appeared a few years before in other collections. Both Schwob and de Feure were French, and the artist is one of the few whose work may be found in collections of Symbolist art as well as books about Art Nouveau design; you’d think there’d be many more among the conterminous movements but this isn’t the case.

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Women are a persistent subject in de Feure’s work, especially the sinister variety who were a staple in fin-de-siècle fiction. Some of these may be found in La Porte des Rêves which features a larger quantity of de Feure’s black-and-white drawing than I’ve seen elsewhere. In a reversal of my usual preferences, I prefer de Feure’s colour work, but anything of his is worth seeing. For a taste of Marcel Schwob’s approach to writing, which included textual collage, see this interview with translator Kit Schluter.

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A triple-page spread.

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The Parade and Baron Verdigris

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Design by Paul Woodroffe.

The Parade, subtitled An Illustrated Gift Book for Boys and Girls, is something that children with wealthy parents or relatives might have received as a Christmas present in December 1897. The contents are an unusual mix of fairy tales, frivolous seasonal fare—A Christmas Mummery, complete with songs and music—and adventure stories set in other parts of the world. The collection was edited by Gleeson White, an art critic whose former position as editor of The Studio magazine explains the very Studio-friendly choice of illustrators.

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The design on the title page is a curious piece by Aubrey Beardsley, one with less authority than the most of the other drawings he was producing in his penultimate year. Those dots filling out the arabesque plant forms are the kinds of things that amateurs do when they’re uncertain about whether or not to decorate a design. The tendril which terminates in a tasselled confection is, however, a typical example of the artist’s bizarre invention, the kind of caprice that used to infuriate the critics who disliked his work. Beardsley’s career had been launched four years earlier with a profile in The Studio, but by 1897 he was often struggling for money after being fired from The Yellow Book in the wake of the Oscar Wilde scandal. Gleeson White is to be commended for supporting him at a time when many others refused to do so.

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L. Leslie Brooke.

Elsewhere in The Parade there are contributions both written and pictorial from Beardsley’s friend, Max Beerbohm; also a story by Richard Burton, a writer you wouldn’t usually expect to find in a book aimed at children. The list of illustrators includes Charles Robinson, Laurence Housman and Manchester’s own Alfred Garth Jones. Beardsley didn’t draw anything else for The Parade but he’s mentioned again in a list of titles advertised in the book’s final pages as having provided a frontispiece for Baron Verdigris, “A Romance of the Reversed Direction” by one Jocelyn Quilp. The title was unfamiliar, and I wasn’t sure at first whether I’d seen the illustration, but the drawing shown below appears in two of my Beardsley books—albeit at small sizes—including the copious Brian Reade collection from 1967.

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“Baron Verdigris” sounds like a minor character from Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time trilogy, while the improbable “Jocelyn Quilp” turns out to be a nom de plume of Halliwell Sutcliffe whose book is described as a “singular novella, a curious amalgam of parodies based on a time-travelling theme“; shades of the Dancers again. It’s tempting to think that this may be the sole example of Aubrey Beardsley illustrating science fiction (or something like it)—the book is generic enough to be listed at ISFDB—but Brian Reade describes the story as “pseudo-mediaeval and facetious”, “dedicated to ‘Fin-de-Siécle-ism, the Sensational Novel, and the Conventional Drawing-Room Ballad'”. That does at least explain the peculiarities of the drawing. Maybe the Moorcock comparison is an apt one after all.

More illustrations from The Parade:

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Charles Robinson.

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Léon V. Solon.

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Weekend links 704

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The Yolk (1953) by Gertrude Hermes.

• “By 1910, a quarter of the 129 million litres of alcohol consumed annually by Frenchmen was absinthe. Of course, the wine industry was threatened by this growing desire for ‘industrial spirits.’ The Pernod Company was the primary producer, but there were dozens of distilleries offering variations of the ambrosial concoction. The Green Fairy had become the Green Curse.” Barnaby Conrad III on the intersections of absinthe and art.

• At Wormwoodiana: “The Zombie of Great Peru is a transgressive novel written in 1697 by Pierre–Corneille Blessebois…a memoir of occultism, seduction, slapstick, and humiliation, set in the racial and sexual hothouse of colonial Guadeloupe. It contains the first appearance of the word ‘zombie’ in literature.” Doug Skinner, the translator of a new edition, talks to Bill Ectric about the book.

• “I have been lucky to have the time to understand, or misunderstand, the concept of sound. It’s all about the sound. I don’t play styles, I don’t play genres, I don’t play jazz. I play my repertoire, my language, my own poetry.” Bill Laswell talking to Paul Acquaro and David Cristol about his career as player and producer.

• New music: Rhan-Tegoth by Cryo Chamber Collaboration. A couple of months ago I was wondering whether Cryo Chamber would be continuing their series of Lovecraftian albums, and, if so, which entity they might choose for the theme of the next one. Now we know.

• “Zines, at their most glorious, are indifferent to dignity, reckless in the statements they reel off, determined to make a virtue of their limited resources.” Sukhdev Sandhu on the history of the fanzine.

• At Unquiet Things: Hazy Shade of Winter: The Artwork of Julius Sergius von Klever.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – December 2023 at Ambientblog.

• At the Daily Heller: Daniel Pelavin’s Pipe Dreams.

• Old music: Buchla Christmas by Warner Jepson.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Isaac Julien Day.

Pipeline (1962) by The Chantays | Pipeline (2005) by Monolake | Banzai Pipeline (2020) by The Surfrajettes

Necronomicon all’italiana

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The 1978 edition of the Necronomicon edited by George Hay remains my favourite among the many fake Necronomica. It was the first one I bought, following a memorable “WTF?!” encounter with the Corgi paperback in WH Smiths, and as a book it’s always been better value than the much more popular “Simon” Necronomicon (1977) despite having a smaller page-count. Hay’s book is as much a general guide to Lovecraft’s fiction as an invented grimoire. In addition to the detailed occult fabulation crafted by Robert Turner and David Langford there’s a lengthy introductory essay by Colin Wilson, while the appendices comprise essays by L. Sprague de Camp (“Young Man Lovecraft”), Christopher Frayling (“Dreams of Dead Names: The Scholarship of Sleep”) and Angela Carter (“Lovecraft and Landscape”). The “Simon” book had little in the way of illustration beyond the few invented sigils which you now see reproduced endlessly in role-playing circles. The Hay book, on the other hand, featured a handful of illustrations by Gavin Stamp (all but one of them them credited to the fictitious “GM Sinclair”) which have been marooned with the essays in obscurity for far too long.

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I posted some of Stamp’s illustrations several years ago but they’re worth visiting again now that an Italian translation of the Hay book has turned up at the Internet Archive. This edition, published in 1979 by Fanucci Editore, includes an additional appendix containing two more text pieces plus a portfolio section with further illustrations by Italian artists. The Italians seem to like Lovecraft’s fiction almost as much as the French do. The first substantial collection of Lovecraftian comic strips and illustrations was an Italian book, The Cosmical Horror of HP Lovecraft, published by Glittering Images in 1991. A more recent collection, Lovecraft Black and White from Dagon Press, featured a quantity of illustrations rather like those at the end of the Italian Necronomicon. The Dagon Press collection also reprinted one of my pieces but I don’t seem to have noted this until now.

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The cover art for the Italian Necronomicon is worth mentioning since this isn’t a recent piece of art at all. The image is one of eleven woodcuts by Lorenz Stöer (c.1537–c.1621) which were published in book form as Geometria et Perspectiva in 1567. Happily, the 2009 BibliOdyssey post about Herr Stöer and his remarkable works is still available, so you can see the whole series and read about their history without my having to go searching for the details. Stöer’s creations are a good match for Lovecraft’s concept of deranged or non-human architecture. They remind me of Fred Chappell’s Remnants, one of the stories in Lovecraft’s Monsters, in which the Great Old Ones return to the Earth and begin to refashion the planet to their own designs.

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