Les Ondes Silencieuses by Colleen

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I haven’t heard this album, the most recent by French musician Colleen (although YouTube has a couple of tracks), it’s being posted here for the Beardsley-esque art. Or is it Bradley-esque, since the bold outlines perhaps owe something to the great Will? Whatever the inspiration, the artist responsible is Iker Spozio whose other music-related commissions can be seen on his Flickr pages, including the original drawing for this CD minus the text boxes.

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For earlier examples of the Beardsley influence in album design there’s this post from a couple of years ago. I’d still like to know the artist responsible for the cover of the Gabor Szabo album, Dreams. If anyone has a clue, please leave a comment.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Bradley does Beardsley
Aubrey Beardsley’s musical afterlife

Weekend links 26

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The interior of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County “Old Main” Building, 1874. Reblogged over the past few days on numerous Tumblr postings, none of whom had bothered to find out any details about the picture. I’m with Silent Porn Star on the contextless reblogging issue.

Keith Richards et Mick Jagger à Londres, TV interviews with the Glimmer Twins from 1968 with some remarkable footage in the second half of Jagger filming the penultimate shot of Performance. That French video site requires further exploration. Also there is a short film from 1961 with Jacques Lasry demonstrating the Cristal Baschet. Related: Jacques Doyen & Jacques Lasry play their Cristals while Arlette Thomas and others read French poetry. I wrote something about the mystery of the Cristal two years ago this week.

• Two great album cover blogs from Jive Time Records: Project Thirty-Three is “a shrine to circles, dots, squares, rectangles and triangles, and the designers that make them come to life on album covers” while Groove Is In The Art “celebrates the era when psychedelic graphics and pop art met the mainstream”.

• At A Journey Round My Skull: Night Hallucinations: illustrations by Jaroslav Šerých for Tales of the Uncanny (Prague, 1976); Snark, Strangeness and Charm, Mahendra Singh’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll and others.

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Laurence Chaves illustrates De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

Austin Osman Spare: Fallen Visionary at the Cuming Museum, Southwark, London in September, “will be the largest showcase of [Spare’s] work in a public museum since his death in 1956.” Jerusalem Press are publishing an expensive monograph to accompany the exhibition.

Freeing “Pale Fire” From Pale Fire; “the next big Nabokov controversy”. Probably not but the thesis is an interesting one.

Quintessential ‘topiary’ in Gandalf’s Garden: Barney Bubbles, head shops and Op Art graphic design.

• Monster Brains discovered some more paintings by Thomas Häfner.

• Spaceweather’s Northern Lights gallery.

The passion of Krzysztof Penderecki.

• More Bookshelf porn.

White peacocks.

Sussan Deyhim: Daylaman | Desert Equations (for Brion Gysin) (with Richard Horowitz) | An interview at WorldStreams.

Several links this week via Adrian Shaughnessy’s Twitter feed. Thanks!

The art of Ray Frederick Coyle, 1885–1924

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Another illustrator who died young, Ray Coyle’s short life no doubt explains why his work isn’t more visible today. The first two illustrations here are from a 1920s edition of Jurgen (1919), the scurrilous fantasy novel by James Branch Cabell which has been praised by enthusiasts of ironic comedy as diverse as Aleister Crowley and Michael Moorcock.

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Some of the illustrations in this Flickr set bear the date 1923 so they may have been Coyle’s last major work. Frank C Papé is the artist more commonly associated with Cabell, and while his art complements the author’s humour, Coyle’s elegant post-Beardsley style seems more suited to Jurgen’s worldly temperament.

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This beautiful drawing is one of six pieces from a memorial book, To Remember Ray Frederick Coyle, published in 1926. A stunning piece of art and this rebound edition has an equally stunning cover design by Jeannie Sack. If anyone has a link to other drawings in this series, please leave a comment.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Fantazius Mallare and the Kingdom of Evil

The art of Anton Pieck, 1895–1987

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The drawings of Dutch artist and illustrator Anton Pieck are very good for their finely-rendered architectural detail when they’re not being too comic or whimsical. Flickr has a few sets of the artist’s work which is useful since his museum site is rather lacking. The bookselling picture above comes from this set of watercolours while the black-and-white piece is from an edition of Grimm’s fairy tales published in 1930. There’s also a page of smaller drawings here.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrators archive

Liceti’s monsters

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Illustrations from De monstrorum natura, caussis, et differentiis libri duo (On the nature, causes and differences of monsters, 1616) by Italian scientist Fortunio Liceti who we’re told has a crater on the Moon named after him. Further images from Liceti and his contemporaries can be found at Les Monstres de la Renaissance à l’âge classique, an online exhibition of assorted teratisms, prodigies and abominations. Via Monsieur Peacay, no monster he.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The etching and engraving archive