{illustrators} – Page 108

Weekend links 108

Bob Staake’s cover illustration acknowledges President Obama’s statement last week in favour of gay marriages.

• Related to the above: Gay rights in the US, state by state, an infographic and a useful riposte to people like Orson Scott Card (yes, him again) who claim that gay Americans are equal in everything but the right to marry. On the same theme, “Now Obama’s come out on same-sex marriage, maybe so will I,” says Edmund White (yes, him again), and Eric Berkowitz, author of Sex & Punishment: 4,000 Years of Judging Desire, who writes that “In the period up to roughly the thirteenth century, male bonding ceremonies were performed in churches all over the Mediterranean.”

• The fifth edition of A Humument by Tom Phillips will be published soon by Thames & Hudson. The Tom Phillips website has just been relaunched in a form which now incorporates the notes I made in December about Phillips’ album cover designs.

• The Greenfriars are encouraging people to follow their example and get involved with their local communities (the habits are optional). Kudos for the choice of a Dürer knot.

The action centres on the arrival of a man who may or may not be a prophet, or the devil, or just a violent con-man, in a rotting, rain-drenched Hungarian hamlet. This is the “estate”, apparently some sort of failed collective, where all hope has been lost and all the buildings are falling down. It is inhabited by a cast of semi-crazed inadequates: desperate peasants cack-handedly trying to rip each other off while ogling each other’s wives; a “perpetually drunk” doctor obsessively watching his neighbours; young women trying to sell themselves in a ruined mill; a disabled girl ineptly attempting to kill her cat.

Sátántango by László Krasznahorkai is published in a new translation by George Szirtes

• The Quietus interviewed Kevin Shields following the long-awaited reissue of the My Bloody Valentine catalogue.

• The first volume of Russ Kick’s Graphic Canon (to which I’m a contributor) has been sighted in the wild.

• Rise of the Living Type: Stylised 17th century floriated letterforms & grotesque mask sprinkles.

• Ed Jansen’s Camera Obscura III, a tour of museums, galleries and venues, 2009–2011.

• io9 reports on the new translation of Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky.

• Shanghai Expression: Graphic Design in China in the 1920s and 30s.

• Liberty Realm, a monograph of drawings by Catharyne Ward.

• 100 mins of Adrian Sherwood‘s best dub productions.

• Strange Flowers checked into the Chelsea Hotel.

• Chelsea Girls (1967) by Nico | Chelsea Morning (1968) by Fairport Convention | Chelsea Hotel #2, Rufus Wainwright sings Leonard Cohen.

Maurice Sendak, 1928–2012

From Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1966) by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

All the obituaries of the late Maurice Sendak have focused inevitably on Where the Wild Things Are. That gives me a chance to draw attention to some less familiar Sendak drawings whose finer crosshatching naturally appeals to an inveterate crosshatcher such as myself. The combination of bold characterisation and dense shading makes these pieces look remarkably similar to Mervyn Peake’s illustrations of the 1940s. Sendak spoke to Nick Meglin about some of the influences on his drawing in The Art of Humorous Illustration (1973). Given what he says here it’s evident that he and Peake (who also admired Cruikshank and Rowlandson) shared antecedents:

Many of the artists who influenced me were illustrators I accidentally came upon. I knew the Grimm’s Fairy Tales illustrated by George Cruikshank. I just went after everything I could put my hands on illustrated by Cruikshank and copied his style. It was quite as simple as that. I wanted to crosshatch the way he did. Then I found Wilhelm Busch and I was off again. But happily Wilhelm Busch also crosshatched so the Cruikshank crosshatching wasn’t entirely wasted. And so an artist grows. I leaned very heavily on these people. I developed taste from these illustrators.

The 1860’s, the great years of the English illustrators from whom so much of my work is derived, are familiarly known as “the sixties” to admirers of Victorian book illustration. The influence of Victorian artists such as George Pinwell and Arthur Hughes, to name just two, is evident in the pictures I created for Higglety Pigglety Pop! (Harper and Row, 1967), Zlateh the Goat (Harper and Row, 1966), and A Kiss for Little Bear (Harper and Row, 1968). And I’ve learned from other English artists as well. Randolph Caldecott gave me my first demonstration of the subtle use of rhythm and structure in a picture book. Hector Protector and As I Went Over the Water (Harper and Row, 1965) is an intentionally contrived homage to this beloved teacher.

From Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1966) by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

For other fine points in picture book making, I’ve studied the works of Beatrix Potter and William Nicholson. Nicholson’s The Pirate Twins certainly influenced Where the Wild Things Are (Harper and Row, 1963).

A retrospective of my English passion can be found in Lullabies and Night Songs (Harper and Row, 1965). The illustrations for this book, which skip from Rowlandson to Cruikshank to Caldecott and even to Blake, are a noisy pastiche of styles, though I believe they still resonate with my own particular sound. Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present (Harper and Row, 1962) is as far as I am aware the only book I’ve done that reveals my admiration for Winslow Homer.

Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life (1967).

About two-and-a-half years after the publication of Where the Wild Things Are, I finally became conscious of my reviving interest in the art I’ve experienced and loved as a child. The trigger was an exhibit (at The Metropolitan Museum) of pages from Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay’s famous newspaper comic strip of the years 1905 to 1911. Before the exhibit I was ignorant of this popular American artist’s pure genius for graphic fantasy. It now sent me scooting back with new eyes to the popular art of my own childhood.

This recognition of personal roots is in no way meant as a triumphant revelation or as reverse snobbism, a put-down of my earlier, more ‘refined’ influences. What I’ve learned from English as well as French and German artists will, if I have my wish, become more absorbed into my creative psyche, blending and living peaceably with my own slice of the past. But of course all this happens on its own or it doesn’t happen at all.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Die Entwicklung der modernen Buchkunst in Deutschland

Thanks are due again to Mr Peacay at BibliOdyssey for drawing attention to this recent addition to the Internet Archive from the Smithsonian collection. Die Entwicklung der modernen Buchkunst in Deutschland (1901) is a compendium of German book illustration edited by Otto Grautoff, and its a particularly good anthology with a lot of content I haven’t seen repeated elsewhere. Many of the artists represented have been featured here already, not least because a number of them appeared regularly in Jugend magazine: Thomas Theodor Heine, Ephraim Moses Lilien, Heinrich Vogeler, and the most eccentric of all German artists of the period, the naturist and mystic known as Fidus (Hugo Höppener) whose drawings receive an entire chapter.

Heine’s depiction of “butterfly dancer” Loïe Fuller.

Continue reading “Die Entwicklung der modernen Buchkunst in Deutschland”

Mrs Patrick Campbell

The Vampire (1897) by Philip Burne-Jones.

Two pictures of the same woman—Mrs Patrick Campbell (1865–1940)—that were regarded as scandalous in their time. Since the centenary of Bram Stoker’s death recently passed I was looking for better copies of the only painting by Philip Burne-Jones that anyone today bothers with, but the best copies to be had are in books so this is a scan from the Coulthart library. It seems the original is either lost or destroyed which makes its status as poor old Burne-Jones’ most celebrated work doubly unfortunate.

Philip Burne-Jones was the son of Edward Burne-Jones, and Burne-Jones Jr’s depiction of a predatory woman was deemed scandalous not for its content—predatory women were a common fixture of male paranoia in the 1890s—but for the rumours that its model, stage actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, and the artist, were having an affair. Mrs Patrick Campbell was born Beatrice Stella Tanner but took her first husband’s name as her stage name. Given the theme, and the fact that Burne-Jones painting was first exhibited the year that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published, prints of The Vampire are a regular fixture in books about the cultural history of vampires in general and Dracula in particular.

Mrs Patrick Campbell (1894) by Aubrey Beardsley. From The Yellow Book, Vol. I.

As for Aubrey’s delightful drawing, this is one of the many Beardsley pictures that caused great consternation when they were first printed yet which appear today to be quite innocuous. Beardsley’s presence in The Yellow Book, and the umbrage taken against drawings such as this, helped give that publication an edge which it lost when Beardsley was forced to leave the magazine following Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment in 1895.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Symbolist cinema
• Druillet’s vampires

Swords against death

Earlier this week Mr BibliOdyssey posted a link on Twitter to a blog entry of his from 2008, a collection of prints by Dutch artist Alexander Ver Huell (1822–1897). If I’d seen his post originally I didn’t recall it so this swordfight gives me an opportunity to draw attention to Ver Huell’s macabre and diabolical work. This unwinnable duel brings to mind the battle with the band of skeletons from Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts (1963), one of my favourite things in the whole world when I was 10. Given how many of the pictures in the Men with swords archive have a quasi-classical theme it’s perhaps appropriate to list Jason and co. among them.