{illustrators} – Page 155

Weekend links 4

Will at A Journey Round My Skull turned up this hand-coloured picture from Ronald Balfour’s illustrated Rubáiyát some of whose other drawings were featured here recently. That distant volcano is a curious detail. Related: Golden Age Comic Book Stories posted plates from Willy Pogány’s edition.

• Authors on authors: China Miéville on JG Ballard; Rodrigo Fresán on Jorge Luis Borges; AS Byatt on Lewis Carroll.

• Events: Alan Moore & Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley present Simultaneous Conjugation of Four Spirits in a Room at the Laing Art Gallery on March 13th, 2010 (via Arthur); in October Weirdstone will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

• New blogs: Wonder Kabinet / Wunderkammer, “curiosities, ephemera, and fragments from The Cutting Room Floor and Evan J Peterson”; Pencil Tool, a Tumblr by Charity Pomaybo; and another Tumblr from Mountain*7.

• Perversity Think Tank is a new book from Supervert. Download it for free or order the delicious limited edition.

• The Casual Optimist lists 10+ Flickr Groups for Book Design and Inspiration.

• Via BibliOdyssey: 400 woodcuts by Eric Gill.

• “At least in self-abuse / There’s a little dignity…” Song of the week was Hands 2 Take by The Flying Lizards from their second album, Fourth Wall (1981). I bought this when it came out but hadn’t listened to it for years. Thrilling, urgent stuff with the fabulous Patti Palladin on vocals. Play loud.

Les Papillons, métamorphoses terrestres des peuples de l’air

Illustrations by Pierre Amédée Varin (1818–1883) of the butterfly people from Les Papillons, métamorphoses terrestres des peuples de l’air (1862), a book by Eugène Nus and Antony Méray. These are from an Amédée Varin set at Flickr which also features some of Varin’s vegetable beings. Butterfly people have been turning up in my own work recently but you’ll have to wait to see those.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Yannis Tsarouchis, 1910–1989
• Butterfly women
• Saint-Aubin’s Butterfly People

Jugend Magazine revisited

It was just over a year ago that I was wishing there was some way to see whole issues of Jugend magazine, the German periodical launched in 1896 whose Art Nouveau style gave its name to the movement in Germany, Jugendstil. Yesterday’s search for Heinrich Vogeler artwork turned up that very thing, scanned editions of Jugend at the University of Heidelberg’s digital archive. Whole numbers from 1896 to 1925! I am aghast. As well as the scanned pages being very high quality you can download the bound collections as PDFs, each one totalling over 400 pages. Leafing through pages of old magazines in a foreign language doesn’t sound very stimulating if you can’t read German but Jugend was a very visual publication. Each issue is crammed with a variety of drawings in styles which range from black-and-white Art Nouveau motifs and quasi-Symbolist illustration to humorous drawings and cartoons. Each issue also featured a large drawing or painting on a fold-out spread.

Continue reading “Jugend Magazine revisited”

Heinrich Vogeler’s illustrated Wilde

The Fisherman and his Soul.

It’s always satisfying when a search intended to satisfy curiosity turns up more than you expect. The subject in this case was German artist Heinrich Vogeler (1872–1942) and the surprise was finding these illustrations for a German collection of Oscar Wilde stories lurking in the archives of the Visual Telling of Stories site. The stock of imagery there is substantial and wide-ranging but the search facility stopped working a while ago and has now been removed so you either have to hit things at random or hope for happy accidents such as this. Vogeler’s volume dates from 1911 and while his draughtsmanship isn’t as assured as some of his contemporaries there’s enough going on to make me want to see more of his illustration work.

The Young King.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The Oscar Wilde archive

The Dark Ledger

The boundless depths of Chris Mullen’s VTS site continue to yield treasures. The documentation for these pictures is somewhat vague but they seem to be illustrations for Fantômas stories which Mullen has grouped under the title The Dark Ledger, part of a larger selection of pages devoted to the Lord of Evil. The depiction of the Eiffel Tower is of interest here for its showing a view over one of the Paris expositions, possibly the Exposition Universelle of 1900. The opium den, on the other hand, seems remarkably overlit and well-appointed compared to the more customary renderings of such places.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exposition Universelle publications
• Exposition cornucopia
• Return to the Exposition Universelle
• The Palais Lumineux
• Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
• Exposition Universelle, 1900
• The Palais du Trocadéro
• The Evanescent City
• Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
• Fantômas