{illustrators} – Page 185

“Weirdsley Daubery”: Beardsley and Punch

Britannia à la Beardsley by ET Reed (1895).

Pickings grow slim for the dedicated Beardsleyphile after you’ve bought a few books. Despite his prolific career, Aubrey B was dead at 25 and the better collections of his work, especially Brian Reade’s essential monograph, Beardsley (1967), tend to contain almost his entire corpus, juvenilia and all. So you find yourself seeking out the work of his imitators, his successors, and even the weak but not altogether unsuccessful “Nichols” fakes from the 1920s.

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Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal

Detail from La Havane by René Portocarrero; photo by C. Marker.

This week’s book finds are a pair of titles I hadn’t come across before in these particular editions, another haul from the vast continent that is the Penguin Books back catalogue. Labyrinths I’ve had for years in a later edition (see below) but the cover of this one seems more suited to Borges (as much as he can be illustrated) than the somewhat bland Surrealism of illustrator Peter Goodfellow. René Portocarrero (1912–1985) was a Cuban painter with a post-Picasso style who specialised in hallucinogenic profiles like the one here. And it’s a guess but I’d bet the “C. Marker” who photographed the painting is French filmmaker Chris Marker (who I compared to Borges last year), director of La Jetée and Sans Soleil. Marker worked as a photo-journalist for many years and made a documentary entitled ¡Cuba Sí! in 1961.

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Winsor McCay’s Hippodrome souvenirs

A cover design by the great cartoonist and pioneer animator. Typical of a compulsive fantasist to add a huge dragon head to an otherwise regulation piece of Chinoiserie. No date or any indication as to whether McCay’s work was also featured inside but there’s another design of his for the same establishment here. The latter version could almost be a page from Little Nemo in Slumberland.

• Bud Plant’s Winsor McCay page

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

The art of Jessie M King, 1875–1949

The Fisherman and His Soul : Her Feet were Naked
from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde, 1915.

A delicate piece of Orientalism illustrating Wilde’s book of fairy tales. Jessie Marion King’s work is a fascinating amalgam of the decorative post-Beardsley style exemplified by Harry Clarke and the Glasgow Style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Arts and Crafts movement. It’s unfortunate that her associations with Mackintosh sometimes overshadow her career as an illustrator despite her being as talented and productive as many of her male contemporaries.

The rest of the Wilde illustrations can be seen at Art Passions along with a number of other works.

• Jessie M King biography page

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia

Or Lust (1919), Envy (1919) and Pride (1918). Very Beardsley-esque posters by Carlo Nicco for a series of Italian films from the silent era starring Francesca Bertini. Doubtless the prolific Ms. Bertini’s demonstrations of the Seven Deadly Sins inspired similar promotional artwork for the other films in the series but these are the only ones visible from this Flickr collection of Italian cinema memorabilia. As with Alla Nazimova’s Salomé (and Gabriel D’Annunzio’s excessive Salammbô-esque epic, Cabiria), this confirms again that fin de siècle Decadence lived on in the early days of cinema, having been banished (for a time) from the worlds of art and literature.

Via Fabulon. (Thanks Thom!)

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